Microsoft Research’s IllumiRoom projects images into your living room | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Research’s IllumiRoom projects images into your living room

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122 pointsashwinuae22 comments

Am I wrong in thinking this is absolutely awesome? I've watched the video several times now, and all I can think is that I want it, now.

It's an incredibly 'simple' concept, and yet the perfect next step in immersive display.

No, I gave up gaming a few years ago and now all I can think about is how awesome it would be play a game with something like that.

I pretty much gave up games too. Especially console games. Especially shooters. I'd still like to try this out with some more chill indie/puzzle games though (i.e. English Country Tune)

Add in a Kinect. Now have fun.

IllumiRoom already uses a Kinect. That's how it captures the geometry of the room.

If that kinect is at the back as I guess it is, then you'd need to add another one at the front to capture your movement properly.

So why on earth didn't the video show the players using it? Huge missed opportunity there.

It's really cool. It might also have the potential to create 180-270-degrees peripheral vision judging by the video, which is something that would fundamentally change first-person games.

Now replace your entire wall with an OLED 8K display.

One of the things I've been playing around with have been the Phillip's "Hue" lights (see the Apple store) which you can control via the Zigbee light protocol. Taking the colors from the screen and doing accent lighting of similar shades. Its kind of amazing how that makes your screen seem bigger.

>Now replace your entire wall with an OLED 8K display.

That would be the only thing from sci-fi movies that could come true.

I guess silver jumpsuits are possible too but isn't that an unspoken rule that such a thing is a big no?

There are clubs for that, and my smartphone is not far beyond Picard's communicator...

In form maybe but not function, then again unless we knew how the communicator worked in the series it's hard to say. Although I can barley get two bars inside at work let alone call someone in orbit.

Do you mean accent lighting around the room, or behind the TV in the vein of Philips's Ambilight[1]?

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambilight

Adafruit makes a DIY version of something very similar.

http://www.adafruit.com/products/461

It was looking at this project that got me started. Its a lot of fun.

The actual Microsoft Research page this is here: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/illumiroom/

By the way: Two of the games shown are Red Eclipse and Supertuxkart, both open source and - of course - run on linux. While SuperTuxKart is not that exciting, Red Eclipse is quite fun.

Meh. I bet they did that just so they could whip up the proof of concept without having to bother a large gaming studio.

Both probably run on Windows, which is (I bet) what the prototype is running.

Nice find! Red Eclipse is btw a Cube2 (aka Sauerbraten) mod. In other news: Cube2 itself got recently a new update: http://sauerbraten.org/docs/history.html#_2013_01_04_collect...

Relevant patent was filled 2011-03-02:

http://www.google.com/patents/US20120223885

http://www.patentbolt.com/2012/09/microsoft-envisions-where-...

Reminds me of the early Kinect marketing videos before it was released. Skateboards being scanned in etc.

Great ideas, but I'll believe it when it ships.

The gaming potential of this is obviously awesome; however, I think this could revolutionize the home good ecommerce world. A user could build an entire room with a couple of clicks.

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