RoomAlive, a new Microsoft concept in the research stage, turns an entire room into an "immersive, augmented, magical gaming experience," the company said.
RoomAlive uses projectors and depth cameras to cover the entire room — floor, walls, furniture — with an interactive experience for gamers.
“With RoomAlive, users can touch, shoot and dodge augmented content that seemingly co-exists with their existing physical environments,” a Microsoft video featuring RoomAlive says.
The video shows basic games, like whack-a-mole, being played as examples of what could be done with RoomAlive.
“There's no way this monitor-and-projection camera rig is either inexpensive or standardized enough to be commercially viable right now,
so take all of this as a proof-of-concept only,” wrote Owen S. Good of Polygon. “Still, it isn't just a battery of projectors creating a super-large viewing surface. Six Kinect sensors follow the player's 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.”
The basic games and skimpy graphics displayed on Microsoft’s YouTube video pulled out groans and grimaces from many videogamers.
“Bollocks. VR Goggles are the way forward, not half a dozen projectors which will cost $300/year to replace bulbs, playing childish games on,” one person wrote.
But others saw the idea’s potential.
“Just checked out this video on RoomAlive. The face of gaming could change quite a bit with something like this. Some impressive ideas IMO,” one commenter on the video wrote. “Now, if they could just make the images holograms next... Hmmm.”
Projection Mapping Central compared the RoomAlive technology to IllumiRoom, another Microsoft concept introduced last year.
“IllumiRoom was largely focused on display, extending traditional gaming experiences out of the TV,” the blog said. “RoomAlive instead focuses on interaction, and the new kinds of games that we can create with interactive projection mapping.”
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