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."

Comments

so.. A holodeck?

[firex726]

so.. A holodeck?

Re:so.. A holodeck?

[Rockoon]

holo-fantasy drugs dont have the same effect, so the occasional drug run will be required.

Re:so.. A holodeck?

[Yvan256]

So she can crash my holodeck?

And how would that make you feel?

Graphics cave

[flyingfsck]

So, a personal game graphics cave circa 1990? That sure is MS innovation for you.

Re:Graphics cave

[Howitzer86]

CAVEs, or CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment, come with devices called trackers. One tracker is located on a pair of shutter glasses that the user wears. This one tracks the location of your head, which then adjusts the screens for distortion. The other tracker is located in a device called a Wanda, which is much like a Wii-mote but about 100 times more accurate. The trackers use a magnetic field that fills not just the sides of the CAVE screens it self (10x10x10 foot cube), but beyond that.

Microsoft's innovation appears to be that it does the same thing, but with just one projector, that uses the walls around the room for peripheral vision - a highly useful feature (just ask any hardcore FPS gamer who has changed his FOV setting). It's probably not as accurate or as pretty, and it's likely going to be somewhere below the half a million you need to build a legitimate CAVE.

Sincerely,

Former University of Arkansas at Little Rock CAVE lab assistant

the furniture

[Billly Gates]

The furniture better not have rounded corners!

Re:Prior Art?

[Rockoon]

When you figure out how to build a teleporter and a replicator, you too will get to patent them.

A rather neat idea

[Animats]

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.

Prior Art: Check UIUC Cave

[rs1n]

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/

Re:Prior Art: Check UIUC Cave

[bws111]

Ye another ill-informed, totally incorrect post modded to +5 informative by clueless mods.

You do NOT PATENT AN IDEA OR CONCEPT, such as "playing a game in a room". You patent HOW YOU DO IT.

Even a cursory look at the link you provided and the actual patent application shows they are not even similar.

The link you provided says they use an "Intersense IS-900 ultrasonic/accelerometer-based tracking system". Claim 1 of the patent says they use a camera. Those are not the same.

The link you provided clearly shows they are using flat, carefully positioned white walls. The patent says that they use the camera "to compensate for the topography of the environmental surface". A different claim states that they "compensate for the color of the environmental surface".

They also talk about things like "shielding the user from the light by detecting his position". In other words, when the user is facing the projector, block out the image that would displayed on his face so as to not blind him. Clearly they don't have to do this in the cave system since it is using rear-projection.

When oh when is the slashdot crowd going to learn what patents are, what they protect, and what prior art is and is not? Something in a movie or science-fiction book is NOT prior art. Something that has the same end result but gets there in a different way is NOT prior art.

Re:Oh baby, Microsoft sure knows how to tease

[hairyfeet]

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.