What do you do if you take the Illumiroom concept of projecting images on to your living room's walls to the next level? You replace that one projector with six and add the same number of Kinect cameras to keep an eye on the player at all times. Suddenly you have a system that allows for digitally generated images to appear on every surface in the room. On top of that, the player can interact with all of it!
In a new conceptual development called RoomAlive, Microsoft teamed up with Projection Mapping, to create a system that lets players shoot at enemies that run along their walls and floors, sit in the middle of a rainforest in their living room, walk around a factory, or play whack a mole with the friends.
The system would of course be pretty expensive, considering it requires six projectors and six Kinects, but the actual set up is supposed to be quire easy. Once everything is installed, as long as the projectors are overlapping, the creators say they could quite easily configure themselves.
This is certainly quite an interesting take on the idea of virtual or at least in this instance, augmented reality, since the real world still very much features. It's that age old argument of those looking to enter digital worlds, will we do it by looking at a screen, or by turning our real world into a digital one.
Which do you guys see as the more viable future technology?
