Ever wanted to join in on the holodeck and get pushed off the SS Enterprise on your officer-achievement ceremony? Please enter, Microsoft Illumiroom! Illumiroom is in production at the Microsoft Research facility; as an eventual addon to the next in the Microsoft Console series. Perhaps the Xbox 720. Ohh, tingles!
The official description can be seen here:
Imagine, instead of just surround sound, surround visuals? Zooming down main street in GTA IV with bullets zipping across your room – vehicles slamming into your gaming chair. The possibilities from this proof of concept project are nearly limitless! Though, some may not like the somewhat unwieldy firmware of Kinect being responsible for mapping Illumiroom.
The Kinect camera maps the player’s room, and then projects game environment onto the room in real time – without custom pre-rendering. This allows for dynamic shadows and texture lighting based on how the room works. Unfortunately it seems that this is limited to pretty square rooms right now, but still a design innovation. Also notable is that it’s not holographic it’s surround lighting. We’ll see holograms eventually…
Despite this design innovation, actual whole room projects of any ‘good’ quality would still costs thousands of dollars for whole room coverage – and the extra display would certainly impact FPS. Still though, this project has promise. I’d certainly love to be one of the first to get on the showboat, and take my place on the SS Enterprise! Maybe data would be so kind as to push me off into the virtual water…
