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."

Comments

...create an augmented reality experience

[lbmouse]

Or you can tell your kids to go outside and experience real reality with fresh air, sunshine, exercise and social interaction.

Re:...create an augmented reality experience

[Lilith's Heart-shape]

I just got to LV36 in RealLife, and let me tell you something: once you get to LV18 and out of the final mandatory tutorial zone (high school), the game is nothing but a grind. And all the spells got nerfed centuries ago. I'm supposed to have Agidyne, Bufudyne, Ziodyne, Diarahan, and Megidolaon. None of 'em work. This game's defective, and I want my money back.

industrial use

[schlachter]

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.

Don't want

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Don't want

[MobyDisk]

I'm kinda glad someone posted this because it is somewhat of an elephant in the room on gaming discussions.

There is a perception that gamers play video games because they are lazy. While that probably applies to many, I think many gamers play video games because they are imaginative, not because they want to escape the physical world. The Wii would not be successful if gamers didn't want to move around. I play games, but I also love laser tag and physically interactive motion sensing arcades like Police 911. The glory of a holodeck is the ability to have both: physical interaction and an imagined reality.

Re:It amazes me

[ArcadeMan]

But are they cheaper than a Kinect?