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Microsoft Games Technology

Microsoft's "RoomAlive" Transforms Any Room Into a Giant Xbox Game 66

Posted by samzenpus from the from-the-comfort-of-your-own-home dept.
An anonymous reader writes Microsoft has unveiled a new augmented reality experience called "RoomAlive". Using projectors and Kinect, RoomAlive allows for fully interactive gaming experiences that take up an entire 3D space. From the article: "RoomAlive builds on the familiar concepts of IllumiRoom, but pushes things a lot further by extending an Xbox gaming environment to an entire living room. It's a proof-of-concept demo, just like IllumiRoom, and it combines Kinect and projectors to create an augmented reality experience that is interactive inside a room. You can reach out and hit objects from a game, or interact with games through any surfaces of a room. RoomAlive tracks the position of a gamers head across all six Kinect sensors, to render content appropriately."
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Microsoft's "RoomAlive" Transforms Any Room Into a Giant Xbox Game More

Microsoft's "RoomAlive" Transforms Any Room Into a Giant Xbox Game

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  • "Mooooom! Barclay is stuck in the RoomAlive again!"

  • Or you can tell your kids to go outside and experience real reality with fresh air, sunshine, exercise and social interaction.

    • And best of all, it's in super-ultra-mega-HD with zero lag and infinite frames per second!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by MobyDisk ( 75490 )

      But the best games have really bad consequences.

    • I just got to LV36 in RealLife, and let me tell you something: once you get to LV18 and out of the final mandatory tutorial zone (high school), the game is nothing but a grind. And all the spells got nerfed centuries ago. I'm supposed to have Agidyne, Bufudyne, Ziodyne, Diarahan, and Megidolaon. None of 'em work. This game's defective, and I want my money back.

    • Or you can tell your kids to go outside and experience real reality with fresh air, sunshine, exercise and social interaction.

      It is chill and dark here, with a cutting wind and rain.

      The kids will be thoroughly soaked by the time they get home from school, and in no mood to socialize with anyone.

    • "Funny how the colors of the world don't seem really real until you viddy them on the screen."

      Anthony Burgess in "A Clockwork Orange"

  • industrial use (Score:4, Interesting)

    by schlachter ( 862210 ) on Monday October 06, 2014 @09:21AM (#48073083)

    I see this as being super useful in product development, industrial, and training settings. It could be drastically cheaper and better than existing commercial solutions, and at the same time, it would probably be prohibitively expensive for your average home gamer.

  • Don't want (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 06, 2014 @09:26AM (#48073149)

    I chose videogames over sports so I could sit on my ass and eat doritos all day long. I don't want to exercise more than throwing my controller against the wall and picking it up when some 12 year old aimbot owns me in CoD while calling me a gay faggot. If I have to move to play Xbox then fuck it, I'm going back to TV.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MobyDisk ( 75490 )

      I'm kinda glad someone posted this because it is somewhat of an elephant in the room on gaming discussions.

      There is a perception that gamers play video games because they are lazy. While that probably applies to many, I think many gamers play video games because they are imaginative, not because they want to escape the physical world. The Wii would not be successful if gamers didn't want to move around. I play games, but I also love laser tag and physically interactive motion sensing arcades like Police [wikipedia.org]

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Yet, the other elephant in the room is that gamers like you describe (casuals, the ones who own Wiis and play at arcades) are largely disowned by "true" gamers (hardcore gamers), like the lazy ones in the OP. It's almost as if these gamers WANT to perpetuate the "lazy gamer" stereotype - whenever people try to add casuals to the gamer group, the hardcore gamers try to exclude them. If casuals were included, the term "gamer" would have a much less negative conotation. But as it stands, right or wrong, when I

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by MobyDisk ( 75490 )

          Does that differ from hardcore basketball or baseball or football or tennis players?

          I am in a gamer group that has some hardcore gamers, but many have families are play more casually now. They are out there. On a similar vein, this is why I started playing ultimate frisbee. There are "pick-up" groups and they allow anyone to play. When I started I couldn't throw a frisbee >10 feet with 30 degrees of accuracy. I still suck, but not quite as badly. :-)

          In general, be it games or sports or wine or movie

  • Just some thoughts.

    First of all, clearly the video falls short of what everyone imagines: a holodeck. Instead we see bad game with poor graphics, limited accuracy, and bad response times. Just a reminder to everyone: Is it 2014 not 2364. The most fascinating part is to see it map out the room by drawing those horizontal and vertical bars. It seems like the hardware might actually be ahead of the software here. Since it knows the layout of the room, it should not show characters walking on the walls or s

  • White sheets to cover your walls? $200... Spending your afternoon explaining to your better half why there are giant holes in your walls where you swear the moles were? Priceless.
  • Training and Simulation coudl really use this technology. Although there already exists augmented reality training, having a company like Microsoft advance the technology can only be beneficial. Just imaging the perks of having special forces, police, first responders, etc. Being able to scale real stairs in buildings but battle artificial flames or artificial enemies. All the realism without the risk (insert argument of whether or not that's actually possible here). Another advantage would be that others
  • "The blood spray particle physics are AMAZING!"
  • Game keeps track of all positions utilized.

    Achievements can be awesome

    Could also backfire if achievement includes count of different partners. I guess that would be a different game....

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • So what you're saying is version 1.0 of the Star Trek Holodeck now exists.

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