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IllumiRoom To Take Gaming Visuals Outside the Box and Onto the Living Room
cylonlover writes "At CES in January, Microsoft Research teased its IllumiRoom concept, which involves projecting an image around a TV screen to enhance video games with additional visuals. Unfortunately, the company didn't offer much info beyond a short video that briefly showed it in action. But the team behind the project recently showed up at the CHI 2013 conference in Paris with some more in-depth details about how IllumiRoom will not only expand the game screen, but completely alter the appearance of your living room."
I think I speak for most gaming enthusiasts when I say "focus on hardware that will be more robust for a better part of this next generation and the games that will be on it and skip the gimmicks".
Really? Because this is from MS this is uncool?
This, plus kinnect, could be the interface of the future. Install it on the ceiling and you could project a video or keyboard on any flat surface. Never have to look for a remote again. Need a calculator, a recipe, a note pad, facebook, etc?
"I think I speak for most gaming enthusiasts"
The fact that Microsoft's Xbox 360 came in dead last this gen in worldwide sales that Microsoft has done everything but listen to what gamers want.
Microsoft's failure in the console market is staggering. Ten years in the market. Effectively tied with Nintendo's worst selling console, the GameCube for last place. Pulled from the market years early because of Microsoft's incompetence in being able to create cost effective hardware.
The Xbox 360 was rushed out the door a year early to try to pad out its installed base numbers and still ended up coming in last place this gen despite:
* Being 200 dollars cheaper than the PS3
* Tens of millions of duplicate consoles being bought from the RRoD fiasco with Xbox 360 owners buying each new model with hopes that Microsoft finally fixed the RRoD, disc scratching/destroying problems, the absurd noise, and on and on
And yet they still think that their Eye Toy clone Kinect and crap like this IllumiRoom are going to magically turn the Xbox into a Wii type success.
This is Microsoft research. They do come up with cool things, the cool things just never make it to market. And needless to say, Microsoft developing the product for their own platform will result in a middling device.
Cool? Definitely. Improve the gaming experience? More than likely. Reality? Not even remotely close.
I would think this would be nice for the office or desktop: your open docs and apps can be spread over the desktop, keep whatever you are updating or need high resolution for on the monitor. When you don't need the high res view anymore, drag the window onto the desktop and move something else form the desktop to the monitor.
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
As a game player i have no desire to jump around like a moron in a graphical room with a kinect. it's a gimmick for little kids.
Who you also don't want jumping around in your home really...
... and take my money!
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
Since I'm not a gamer, I can't speak for it's desirability in gaming. But I think I can see a niche use for something like this when I notice the "ripple your room" effect mentioned in the slideshow. I like a lot of bass heavy music (yes my neighbour hates me, thanks for asking), I think it'd be cool to have the room appear to quiver in a subtle way in time with the kick drums or long bass guitar solos. For that matter; think of the iconic water ripple scene in Jurassic park. Imagine your room rippling when the water does. Again, done in a subtle way (like most good special effects!) it could really help the sense of immersion.
So, when I first saw newsflashes about this at some places, I just couldn't see the novelty in it (since it's not some actual device that you can buy, but basically a research proof-of-concept of a classical projector-camera pairing with depth and surface estimation based on projected patterns). Then, after talking to some people outside the related field, it turned out a lot of people don't know much about projecting to non-homogeneous and/or non-flat surfaces. For such people, Googling for video mapping should clear up a lot of this topic. Yes, this time they are using Kinect, which can make depth and structure estimation easier in a small room, and the effects seem nice enough, however, I just don't see what all the fuss is about. Even the paper lists implementation and feedback analysis as contributions, an I'm sorry but I just can't see the novelties in there to justify a scientific publication. A tech demo, sure, since it's working, it's highly visual and entertaining, can be a crowd pleaser. But other than that...
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Gotta tell you man, I'm not light about my gaming, I play all genres, during many hours. That's pratically all I do in my free time. I'm the ~1000 hours clocked into the Monster Hunter franchise, ~400 hours into the X universe, ~250 hours into the borderlands franchise kind of gamer and I really don't get all the bro's resistance to these gimmics, they aways look so awesome to me.
I'm also very carefull and wait to see if anyone will make good use of them but this one in particular seems to have much more potential than most gimmics.
Having said that this is a microsoft product and I won't play a xbox even if people paid me to do so. The only good thing out of it will probably be the youtube experimentation videos just like with kinectic.
Also, the Oculus rift will render it obsolete anyway.
Advances in screen tech due to the explosive smartphone market have made it possible to have good cheap VR solutions. Get on the Ball Sony & Microsoft. Oculus Rift or Bust.
Does ANYONE sit 15 feet away from the TV when playing games or working on a computer? This would be awesome if I didn't have to sit so far from the screen that I need binoculars to make out the HUD.
to hide all the remote controls in the room.
Nice to see Microsoft is using open source games to show the capabilities of their system. It's a bit disappointing to see that they misspelled SuperTuxCart (sic) in the YouTube video.