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Microsoft Patent Details Whole-Room Projection Game Environment
Mackadoodledoo writes "Details of an immersive video games display system that projects images of the title's environment around a player's room have been revealed in a U.S. patent belonging to Microsoft."
so.. A holodeck?
So, a personal game graphics cave circa 1990? That sure is MS innovation for you.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
But mom, I can't make my bed until I kill the zombies guarding it! And I can't possibly clean up my room until they stop bleeding on the carpet.
The furniture better not have rounded corners!
http://saveie6.com/
When you figure out how to build a teleporter and a replicator, you too will get to patent them.
"His name was James Damore."
This is a rather neat idea. It is intended to present the effect of a CAVE system, but without a dedicated room. The new ideas here involve using something like a Kinect to profile the room in terms of both geometry and color, then adjust the projected images to compensate. The room wall display comes from a projector atop the main monitor, a projector with optics set up to display a 360 degree image. (Aim a projector at a shiny sphere, and you get half a sphere of projection. Two such rigs facing each other will cover a whole sphere, except for the area behind the projectors. Or you can use fisheye lenses on projectors.)
All this stuff has to be aligned. When you have a wide-angle Kinect-like device, control all the projectors, and have modern CPU and GPU power, alignment will be a few seconds of flashing patterns as the room model is built. Thereafter, as long as you don't move too far from your initial position in the room, the geometry should be good.
The wall projections will probably be somewhat low-rez for now, but that will improve as projectors improve. Even with a low-rez environment, you'll have much better situational awareness in games. (In other words, you can see when somebody is about to attack you from behind.) Any game with group melee combat can benefit from this. Impressive.
Isn't having thought about it supposed to be enough prior art?
This was already done by UIUC -- they have "caves" in the Beckman Institute that already do this, and I believe they even played Quake II in there.
Beckman Institute Cave link: http://isl.beckman.illinois.edu/Labs/CAVE/CAVE.html
Quake II in cave: http://www.visbox.com/prajlich/caveQuake/
Why am I not surprised with a UID like "KinkyKing" you are posting "more baby more"?
As for TFA, who in the hell is gonna have a room so perfectly uncluttered and whose walls are all bare enough to make this worth using? I think a more workable idea was that one I saw awhile back where they had the VR helmet and a little treadmill like thing that allowed 360 degree movement. At least with that the player could stand in one little spot and not have to worry about having perfectly clear walls to project their games onto.
Frankly though with all the patents that all the big corps are getting nowadays it seems to me more like they are just throwing shit at a wall and hoping that something sticks. Since patents last for 20 years and the USPTO lets you be vague as hell when it comes to them I wouldn't be surprised if anything involving games and projection for the next 20 odd years will be getting a phone call from a MSFT lawyer with their hand out. We really need a "use it or lose it" clause where if you don't actually use the patent to make some product, at a reasonable price and offered at a reasonable number of locations to keep them from just making a one off and asking a million bucks for it, then you lose the patent, simple as that. That would help get rid of all the patent trolling and might even keep companies from spamming the USPTO by making them think about having to actually make a product of some kind out of what they are filing for.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Think about making a 'treadmill' that allows 360 degree movement. You are ether standing inside a ball or on top of one.
There is one system (Russian) that does put you in a giant transparent sphere. (Saw this at Nextfest)
However, there are some other systems for doing this that work pretty well...
One is a treadmill, actually two, set at right angles, one sort of "riding on" the other (don't know the exact mechanism, just saw the video) As you walk, say north, the N-S treadmill runs south. If you turn west, the E-W treadmill starts moving you east. If you move on a diagonal they both run in opposition to your movement to keep you near the center.
There is a cute one with motorized roller skates that slowly roll you back to center.
There is also an interesting psychological approach to this problem. One system actually keeps changing the map layout so you gradually keep yourself centered. This works well with a map with a lot of turns, of course. It works by making your turns "not quite" or "a little more than" 90 degrees; and then changing the layout behind you. As I recall, most people were unaware of the changes.
That said, I own an old VR helmet. You're going to want to sit and have solidly mounted controls in your hands. Less pukey that way.
I've been using an HMD for about 8 years. The 'pukey' years were back when I couldn't refresh the display fast enough to keep the display up with head tracking. So, my inner-ear and visual cortex had to fight it out. Now I'm getting a good FPS, no more puke. I run freestanding with a hand controller. If you think about it, you walk though real-life without nausea. If the head tracking and refresh are solid, it just looks like RL.