Microsoft is working on technology that would make the Holodeck of the Star Trek universe seem possible. It’s called IllumiRoom, and hypothetically turns your entire living room into a gaming display. Details emerging show that it uses the Xbox 360 (or Windows) Kinect to scan your living room, combined with a projector to then display whatever you’re playing or watching onto your walls, couch, and you.
Obviously, this could mean huge advances in the level of immersion games offer; you could literally see through the eyes of a quarterback in Madden NFL, fight enemies head-on in games like Call of Duty or Gears of War, and if applied to movies, would completely negate the need to go to an IMAX theater to see entertainment on a massive scale.
“Our system uses the appearance and the geometry of the room to adapt the projected visuals in real-time without any need to custom pre-process the graphics,” Microsoft Research claims. There’s no word on if IllumiRoom will be incorporated into the company’s follow-up to the Xbox 360, expected to be revealed at E3 this year.
They plan on showing off the tech at the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems coming up in Paris toward the end of April. In the meantime, check out this video, which Microsoft says was captured in real-time using IllumiRoom.
