This proof-of-concept looks worth expanding
You may not instantly recognize the name, but you should remember hearing about Microsoft’s attempt to expand gaming beyond the scope of televisions and on to physical walls using a projector. It sounded beyond gimmicky at first, but the potential certainly seems to exist if the tech enhances rather than dominates in practice. More information about the project has come from Microsoft Research itself, and it’s worth a look.
Using a Kinect for Windows camera and a projector mounted on, say, a coffee table, “Our system uses the appearance and the geometry of the room (captured by Kinect) to adapt the projected visuals in real-time without any need to custom pre-process the graphics.”
If IllumiRoom or something derivative of the project makes it into the next Xbox — which does not seem like as sure of a bet as you might think — that could be very interesting for gaming and non-gaming applications alike. While I’m not at all looking forward to more of the Kinect experience as we know it, this could potentially convince me otherwise.
