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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'm not sure about the success of the Wii. Huge sales numbers certainly, but I know ours was collecting dust, until the Wii-U came around and disappointed us.
We didn't even buy an XBox 360. After they had been on the market for years, we received one as a gift (from someone who received it as a gift but already had one). It came with the Kinect. We didn't use it much. The kid wanted Kinectimals. Doesn't play it. We played a few downloadable XBox exclusive games, otherwise haven't really used it. There is one exception. My kid still makes heavy use of the Xbox for a couple of those dancing games. (But for some reason prefers the Wii for these games.)
The only real winner in our house is the PS3. But even they screwed it up. We are heavy downloaders from the PSN store, but now the store is basically unusable. And we didn't bother with the move. Which means we didn't bother with several titles we might otherwise have purchased.
Things were a lot simpler when the next generation meant much better graphics and the differences between the consoles were several key titles (usually first party) so that you really had to get all the consoles anyway. The difference between consoles now are the gimmicks, but the problem is that they are just gimmicks. They aren't radical new gaming paradigms. Yeah, it's neat, but for me (a child of the 70's and 80's) the greatest changes to the controller were the first dual shock, and then wireless. The Wiimote got shoehorned in even if it didn't work. Ironically some of the first party titles (like Wario Shake It and Super Mario Bros. Wii) use the Wiimote the least. These titles aren't going to be showing up on other systems, so they should be making full use of it. But they don't. The controls are perfect - and that's a good thing. But that's exactly what other developers should be doing (or even just ignoring that feature) and they just didn't.
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
Did.. you actually read anything about it? This has nothing to do with motion of the player. The Kinect is used as a 3D camera in order to determine the shape of your room and the objects in it, so the image produced by the projector can then be altered to provide a "seamless" (subject to position of the player) continuous image, or movement which interacts with the room. About the only thing NOT moving in this is the player, although that would be a logical extension of it.
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
... 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.
I'm not a game player, but I do enjoy jumping around like a moron. With or without a kinect. OTOH I don't enjoy my upstairs neighbors jumping around like morons, so you may have a point there.
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.
My upstairs neighbors are bats. They're relatively quiet, though sometimes they make some noise up there. When we had the roof replaced a year ago, the previous upstairs neighbors, a family of racoons (seemingly a new litter every spring from the sound of it) were evicted.
Human upstairs neighbors? That must suck.
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.
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.
I too would much prefer an Oculus Rift for single-player and online gaming. However, there's no way I'm buying several of them for gaming with my friends, besides the cost it sort of defeats the point of gaming in the same room if you're totally cut off from each other except during breaks. Come to think of it though Illumiroom wouldn't be much better - some of the lighting and special effects and such might be workable with split-screen, but I'm not dishing out more than a few bucks for gimmicks, and frankly I think most of them would be more distracting/nauseating than entertaining. Still, it might add a little something for split-screen, while also providing the extended screen for solo play. Of course for first-person stuff it still wouldn't touch the Rift, but for strategy games, etc. it might add something, and would probably be more comfortable for extended gaming sessions.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.