Microsoft’s research division has put up a new prototype called RoomAlive, which turns a living room into an interactive augmented reality space. The project brings the user off the couch to interact with the environment it renders on the furniture and other surfaces.
The video gives you an idea of how that works exactly.
Some game concepts specific to RoomAlive are being shown, including a shooter type of game and an interactive danger room where traps come out off the walls.
The basic building blocks of RoomAlive are projector-depth camera units, which can be combined through a scalable, distributed framework. The projector-depth camera units are individually auto-calibrating, self-localizing, and create a unified model of the room with no user intervention.
They investigate the design space of gaming experiences that are possible with RoomAlive and explore methods for dynamically mapping content based on room layout and user position.
Six Kinect sensors follow the players head around the play space, and RoomAlive’s software recognizes the different surfaces in the room’s layout and adapts the video game to them.
More news soon…
