Microsoft Patent Details Whole-Room Projection Game Environment 118
Mackadoodledoo writes "Details of an immersive video games display system that projects images of the title's environment around a player's room have been revealed in a U.S. patent belonging to Microsoft."
Graphics cave (Score:4, Informative)
A rather neat idea (Score:4, Informative)
This is a rather neat idea. It is intended to present the effect of a CAVE system, but without a dedicated room. The new ideas here involve using something like a Kinect to profile the room in terms of both geometry and color, then adjust the projected images to compensate. The room wall display comes from a projector atop the main monitor, a projector with optics set up to display a 360 degree image. (Aim a projector at a shiny sphere, and you get half a sphere of projection. Two such rigs facing each other will cover a whole sphere, except for the area behind the projectors. Or you can use fisheye lenses on projectors.)
All this stuff has to be aligned. When you have a wide-angle Kinect-like device, control all the projectors, and have modern CPU and GPU power, alignment will be a few seconds of flashing patterns as the room model is built. Thereafter, as long as you don't move too far from your initial position in the room, the geometry should be good.
The wall projections will probably be somewhat low-rez for now, but that will improve as projectors improve. Even with a low-rez environment, you'll have much better situational awareness in games. (In other words, you can see when somebody is about to attack you from behind.) Any game with group melee combat can benefit from this. Impressive.
Prior Art: Check UIUC Cave (Score:5, Informative)
Beckman Institute Cave link: http://isl.beckman.illinois.edu/Labs/CAVE/CAVE.html [illinois.edu]
Quake II in cave: http://www.visbox.com/prajlich/caveQuake/ [visbox.com]
Re:Prior Art: Check UIUC Cave (Score:4, Informative)
Ye another ill-informed, totally incorrect post modded to +5 informative by clueless mods.
You do NOT PATENT AN IDEA OR CONCEPT, such as "playing a game in a room". You patent HOW YOU DO IT.
Even a cursory look at the link you provided and the actual patent application shows they are not even similar.
The link you provided says they use an "Intersense IS-900 ultrasonic/accelerometer-based tracking system". Claim 1 of the patent says they use a camera. Those are not the same.
The link you provided clearly shows they are using flat, carefully positioned white walls. The patent says that they use the camera "to compensate for the topography of the environmental surface". A different claim states that they "compensate for the color of the environmental surface".
They also talk about things like "shielding the user from the light by detecting his position". In other words, when the user is facing the projector, block out the image that would displayed on his face so as to not blind him. Clearly they don't have to do this in the cave system since it is using rear-projection.
When oh when is the slashdot crowd going to learn what patents are, what they protect, and what prior art is and is not? Something in a movie or science-fiction book is NOT prior art. Something that has the same end result but gets there in a different way is NOT prior art.