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Microsoft's "RoomAlive" Transforms Any Room Into a Giant Xbox Game
An anonymous reader writes Microsoft has unveiled a new augmented reality experience called "RoomAlive". Using projectors and Kinect, RoomAlive allows for fully interactive gaming experiences that take up an entire 3D space. From the article: "RoomAlive builds on the familiar concepts of IllumiRoom, but pushes things a lot further by extending an Xbox gaming environment to an entire living room. It's a proof-of-concept demo, just like IllumiRoom, and it combines Kinect and projectors to create an augmented reality experience that is interactive inside a room. You can reach out and hit objects from a game, or interact with games through any surfaces of a room. RoomAlive tracks the position of a gamers head across all six Kinect sensors, to render content appropriately."
"Mooooom! Barclay is stuck in the RoomAlive again!"
Not sure I want that many projectors in my living room.
Or you can tell your kids to go outside and experience real reality with fresh air, sunshine, exercise and social interaction.
Could this be the predecessor to the holodeck?
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
how many "products" have been created to give the Kinect a reason to exist. Hey Microsoft, it's not 2008 anymore and the Wii trend has died off. You can safely bury Kinect now. No one cares.
I must admit the first thing that came to my mind was that, this was something i saw a decade ago, and something i feel is already obsolete.. IT hardly feels new whatsoever, the hardware, maintenance, and power requirement must be quite high. The VR technology seems like a much better technology to pursure than this one.
I recall Acorn being able to turn a room into an "interactive experience" with their Risc PC and a camera back in, oh, the mid-90s. So we're twenty years on and now redmond has a proof of concept that can do the same? What innovation! What progress! A-fucking-ma-fucking-zing.
This will make those poor souls living in wood frame apartment buildings OH so happy. That is, unless they live on the top floor and have no consideration for the dudes living underneath them.
I see this as being super useful in product development, industrial, and training settings. It could be drastically cheaper and better than existing commercial solutions, and at the same time, it would probably be prohibitively expensive for your average home gamer.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
I chose videogames over sports so I could sit on my ass and eat doritos all day long. I don't want to exercise more than throwing my controller against the wall and picking it up when some 12 year old aimbot owns me in CoD while calling me a gay faggot. If I have to move to play Xbox then fuck it, I'm going back to TV.
So it's a CAVE, but with an Xbox in your home.
That or the Nintendo On hoax from before the Wii was announced.
And all will have hidden Kinect sensors watching your every action, analyzing the games you play, how often you drink Mountain Dew, how often you cry when you lose a match, whether you call the preteen who just whooped your ass a "faggot", "dickhead", or "cocksucker", how often your mom tells you to get off the XBONE and get a life, how often you get laid ( wait, who am I kidding? Xbox gamers don't get laid lol). And all this data will go to marketing so you will get ads on your XBONE (and now the microsoft wants "convergence", on every other windows device you own). Or maybe they can even blackmail you by saying they will release the videos of you jerking off your little dick to whatever anime babe is on your XBONE.
LOL, Microsoft has a profitable future ahead of them.
Just some thoughts.
First of all, clearly the video falls short of what everyone imagines: a holodeck. Instead we see bad game with poor graphics, limited accuracy, and bad response times. Just a reminder to everyone: Is it 2014 not 2364. The most fascinating part is to see it map out the room by drawing those horizontal and vertical bars. It seems like the hardware might actually be ahead of the software here. Since it knows the layout of the room, it should not show characters walking on the walls or stuck in corners, yet it does so.
I wonder if this would be better if they didn't try to make it work in a living room covered in furniture. Instead, these could replace the arcade: a custom made arena for playing these kinds of games. The benefit here over a VR helmet is the social aspect, and no motion sickness. But clearly we need better software, better projectors, and better sensors before this is a reality. I just hope they don't launch something before it is ready: that could delay the industry a decade because then, even once the tech IS ready, everyone will be remembering the cruddy version that came out 10 years prior.
Kinect: $150 x 6 = $900
Projector: $300 x 6 = $1800
Vaguely described processors: $100 x 6 = $600
Having less games than the Super Scope or Menacer? Priceless.
Kinect? Ahahahhaaha stay the fuck out of my rooms!
White sheets to cover your walls? $200... Spending your afternoon explaining to your better half why there are giant holes in your walls where you swear the moles were? Priceless.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
It is basically a Cave http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_automatic_virtual_environment from the 80's in your living room.
Microsoft did their best but a Cave is empty and a living room is not.
They still have dark corners in the demo, even while they use 6 projectors and 6 Kinects.
If installing a 7.2 speaker set is already difficult, installing 6 or more projectors on your ceiling is almost impossible in a normal living room.
There are more unresolvable issues:
The player's shade will be in front of the beam and as such block out the image.
Move your couch one inch and you have to recalibrate.
The 3D projection will be only correct from one angle, maybe you can adjust the perspective dynamically for one player but not for two.
It assumes the room is ridged, if you play an action game, jumping and running, even in a concrete building, the movement will cause the stitching between projectors to be misaligned.
Training and Simulation coudl really use this technology. Although there already exists augmented reality training, having a company like Microsoft advance the technology can only be beneficial. Just imaging the perks of having special forces, police, first responders, etc. Being able to scale real stairs in buildings but battle artificial flames or artificial enemies. All the realism without the risk (insert argument of whether or not that's actually possible here). Another advantage would be that others could view, live or recorded, the events taking place!
Yawn, microsoft always coming late https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE3FRPn6AZ4
"The blood spray particle physics are AMAZING!"
Not being a gamer, I do not really know what the state-of-the-art in gaming is like. However, what I see in the video is pretty pathetic, to put it mildly. I was not expecting a holodeck, but the stuff in the video is risible in its crudeness and naivete.
CAVE is a recursive acronym that stands for CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment. The CAVE is a projection-based VR display that was developed at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago. It premeried at the SIGGRAPH 1992 conference.
A friend of mine writes geological software for the oil industry. Back in the day (mid-late 1990s) Silicon Graphics used to come round once a year to show off their gear. Once they got to see their CAVE powered by some nice Irix servers...
Hopefully just a code name - sounds like a bad horror movie. Saw XXXVIII: Room Alive
...at any mall. A virtual world is projected onto the floor and special motion sensing cameras allow you to interact with either virtual bubbles or soccer balls. A truly spectacular experience.
to me it looks to have all the fun and excitement of duck hunt, except now in 3 dimensions. (massive sarcasm duck hunt was only fun for about 10 minutes)
Achievements can be awesome
Could also backfire if achievement includes count of different partners. I guess that would be a different game....
My whole house is already a video game. It's called "real life", and it's harder than any video game you've ever played, though it is fun at times. ;)
So what you're saying is version 1.0 of the Star Trek Holodeck now exists.
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"