Microsoft Uses Kinect to Augment Your Home Theater Experience with IllumiRoom

[Shawn Zipay]

Microsoft Research has shown off some rather neat augmented reality tech today that they're calling IllumiRoom. Using Kinect, IllumiRoom will augment the space around your television, creating entire new areas, simulate movement, and extend the view around the TV itself.

IllumiRoom uses a Kinect for Windows camera and a projector to blur the lines between on-screen content and the environment we live in allowing us to combine our virtual and physical worlds. For example, our system can change the appearance of the room, induce apparent motion, extend the field of view, and enable entirely new game experiences.

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. What you see in the videos below has been captured live and is not the result of any special effects added in post production.

Shown at CES 2013, there is no saying for sure when or even if this tech will be released to the end consumer.

(via Microsoft)

[jimykx]

Looks promising. Not in the way of it being successful but in the way of it being a good investment and advancement in the augmented reality world. Come on, we already have the kinect and will soon have stuff like the Oculus RIft. Those combined would make some pretty good FUNFUNFUNFUN

[K-16]

I agree that combining AR technologies would improve the overall surreal experience when interacting with media, and as a personal opinion, I find the Kinect is more useful as a tool rather than as a controller (motion capturing without the suit is pretty convenient for amateur filmmakers).

However in this scenario, how does one enjoy the features of IllumiRoom, when the player is blinded by the Oculus Rift wrapped around their eyes? Would this be for spectators then?

[jimykx]

I was talking about the oculus rift+kinect only, but I'm all supportive of the investment in these kind of VR and augmented reality technologies!

[K-16]

Fair enough. That's definitely more feasible, although not too many households can prepare a room suitable for a person blind to their surroundings to play a motion-controlled game. Keep in mind with the Oculus Rift, they can't see the physical room they're in with the goggles obscuring their vision, so they'll need a large empty room or a sit-down game to play without causing environmental and self-inflicted damage.

Still, I can't help but dream about being able to carry an Airsoft rifle (not loaded of course), have the Kinect detect it as a customized peripheral, and use the Oculus Rift to play an on-rails shooter like Crisis Zone. I say on-rails because I don't have enough room to include an omni-directional treadmill for first-person shooters. So by all means, I agree with your point. Just uh... Lets include a clause that sets a limit as to how far we want augmented reality to go. If we develop anything remotely similar to The Matrix, I'm out. I am NOT going to play games that make me question what is reality.

[jimykx]

Fair enough. That's definitely more feasible, although not too many households can prepare a room suitable for a person blind to their surroundings to play a motion-controlled game. Keep in mind with the Oculus Rift, they can't see the physical room they're in with the goggles obscuring their vision, so they'll need a large empty room or a sit-down game to play without causing environmental and self-inflicted damage.

Still, I can't help but dream about being able to carry an Airsoft rifle (not loaded of course), have the Kinect detect it as a customized peripheral, and use the Oculus Rift to play an on-rails shooter like Crisis Zone. I say on-rails because I don't have enough room to include an omni-directional treadmill for first-person shooters. So by all means, I agree with your point. Just uh... Lets include a clause that sets a limit as to how far we want augmented reality to go. If we develop anything remotely similar to The Matrix, I'm out. I am NOT going to play games that make me question what is reality.

I think we are closer to developing a way to be inside games than to develop a game so realistic that makes us question which is reality :P. Also, I've been experimenting with the kinect on pc and you don't really need a lot of space to use it, my 1x1m on the side of my bed is perfectly enough, since you don't really have to move forward for your character to move forward, or move sideways for it to do the same. This problem has been overcome by simply putting your right leg in front of your left one (for example), which gives the computer the command to move forward. You want to run in the game? simply lean forward and this input will make your computer press "shift" to sprint. I only think that the problem associated with this and the oculus rift, is that after a long exposure to this method you would start to be confused in real life. Just imagine that you want to sprint and all you do is lean forward, and you're like: "This game's glitched as hell"