Microsoft’s ‘RoomAlive’ transforms any room into a giant Xbox game | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft’s ‘RoomAlive’ transforms any room into a giant Xbox game

theverge.com

102 pointskenrick9527 comments

Interesting project, but projectors always have the issues that they project shadows as well and unless you have every area filled in a redundant way, you will end up breaking the illusion when you enter the room and project your own shadow. On top of that, I am not sure if there's much to do, game-wise, in such an environment.

EDIT: I'd be more excited with Full Room VR experience, using Kinect devices everywhere to detect your movements, hands and so on.

The shadows would not break immersion if they are part of the game. Either a significant part, such as the shadow is a representation of the player which needs to dodge light bullets.. Even if the shadows are not a significant part of the game, the player character and all the objects in the room both projected and real need to have a shadow in the game world. Instead of the computer having to calculate and render every shadow the projectors will take care of the shadows for the real objects as a side-effect.

> Instead of the computer having to calculate and render every shadow the projectors will take care of the shadows for the real objects as a side-effect.

I'm not convinced, since the abundance of projectors around the scene is going to create multiple shadows all around - therefore you do have a problem of an innatural amount of shadows, just like on a football field at a night game, with 6 or more shadows around a single person.

Even more distracting than the shadows would be the fixed perspective. Unless you include some form of head tracking, the immersion will never feel real. Unfortunately, it'll limit one person per room.

Classic example of head tracking: http://youtu.be/Jd3-eiid-Uw

Using the same idea as 3D projection, you could support multiple people per room, but with reduced frame rate and the requirement that they wear glasses.

With 6 kinects in a reasonable configuration, I imagine you could achieve some decent head tracking. Probably not good enough to be convincing, though.

There are a couple of dev teams working on something similar with Kinect(s) and Oculus Rift. The two main applications I've seen are VR "movies" that would record a scene with both video and depth information which would allow you to walk around in a recorded "scene" as it plays back. The other is focused on using depth cameras to capture depth and video information and then compress and transmit it to create a more immersive form of telepresence.

I think that sort of thing is a much "bigger" application of VR technology than the gaming focus that it's starting out with. Gaming makes sense as a starting point since there are already engines and frameworks in place for generating 3d content that can be rendered from different angles to create the 3d illusion.

Still, I look at it like the early nickelodeons and parlor games seen at the advent of motion pictures. I think it will be much more useful when you can place small, inexpensive depth cameras near the top of each wall of a room (for example) and use that to capture depth and video information. That could be used to build a real-time 3d map of a room and people in the room and used in recorded or live communication. I think it's already at the point where this stuff can be done in a prototype form but as head-mounted displays and processing hardware is refined, it will be able to move from something requiring ski goggles and beefy workstations to streamlined specs and consumer-electronics base station appliances.

Maybe not as a gaming experience. But this could be super cool in the kitchen. Imagine having your recipe or cooking video projected onto the bench or wall and follow you around as you prepare the meal. No more worrying about getting food on your laptop.

You realize of course that 'in the kitchen with recipes' is like the Cold Fusion of computers right? Ever since Altair first talked about "your very own microcomputer" there has been a "and you can have all your recipes at your fingertips in the kitchen" meme to go along with it. And it has never happened. Seriously, its like the anti-app or something.

Is it really that far-flung of an idea? A modern tablet will get you 90% of the way there. Google Glass would get you the rest.

No not a far-flung idea, and I would agree the iPad (or perhaps simply tablets) are perhaps the most successful here[1]. The observation though is that it is almost always thrown out there as the thing that it going to be really killer and it never is that thing. The Honeywell advertisement is a great example.

[1] My wife would use her iPad more for this if she could write notes on it. I'm looking at a Note pro for that application, and of course being able to pull up info from the filer rather than the 'cloud'.

It has already happened. My wife uses an ipad rather than a cook-book in the kitchen all the time.

Besides, no well prepared meal is complete without a pic of the completed work uploaded to facebook :-) .

Is she cooking from one app/format that could be projected easily? When using a resource like that, I usually cook from a mixture of books, blogs, recipe sites and so on. It would be too difficult to get that info put onto a clearly readable display IMO. Sometimes they're lists, sometimes they're fragments of info in image captions, or in a story.

I suspect sound is probably a much better approach. A good speaker + microphone and you can intuitively do things like set 30 minute timers as you put something in the oven. Or just get a quick rehash of the next steps. "Finished kneading bread, now what?"

Also, a single recipe is fairly easy to follow, handling a few a the same time is where a computer could actually be useful.

I have posted here before about an app that helps you schedule a set of recipes so that things are ready in sequence. It would show you what can be prepared in advance, what needs to be done just before plating, etc. A recipe Gantt chart.

I could also make use of a touchscreen splashback showing either general entertainment or recipes where I could strike off ingredients or steps as they were completed. Saves having the iPad or a book taking up bench space.

Could have touchscreen in one area and then display with heat-resistant glass behind the cooktop. Maybe in 10 years time.

Even earlier:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeywell_316#Kitchen_Computer

So then you end up with a bunch of flat surfaces in your kitchen so you can actually make out the text/video with projectors aimed directly at that. Might as well make them embedded screens at that point I'd think. If you want to be 100% "follow you around" mobile just attach a pico projector to your chest and see whether you can read how many tablespoons of mustard you need off of a handful of turnip leaves. I'd think it'd be more useful to me to just have a screen up where I can reference it rather than something that follows me around.

Who doesn't have a lot of flat surfaces in their kitchen?

Just noting down the recipe on cheap paper will be less cool, but the total cost of ownership of the setup will probably be much lower :).

Obvious game killing issues -

Any game that would be fun to play would be too dangerous to sell.

I can't see it narratively being more immersive than a simple computer screen/tv. To much disjoint from things in the room/3D open space would stop that hypnotic state people get when concentrating on a screen.

Applications outside games might be interesting. Commercial venues for interactive stories perhaps.

I want that for our Hackerspace. It reminds me of the recent Bret Victor's talk, "Seeing Spaces".

http://vimeo.com/97903574

http://s3.amazonaws.com/worrydream.com/SeeingSpaces/SeeingSp...

And you only need six projectors, six Kinects, and all light-colored surfaces!

How will they handle someone casually looking up/around? I have a projector and sometimes I accidentally walk infront of it, facing the bulb. The light is unpleasant when shone directly into the eyes.

Looks like a poor man's CAVE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_automatic_virtual_environ... for your bedroom. They should have called it the ManCAVE. ;)

This doesn't look anywhere near as immersive as VR.

This reminds me a black mirror episode!

Since when is TheVerge a good source for HN? (just as it's starting to get hated in others places - Reddit - no less)

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