Microsoft showcases gaming reality with RoomAlive

Microsoft Research is a division of the Redmond giant in charge with the developing of many futuristic projects. The latest one to see center stage is RoomAlive – an enhanced reality system that will bring a realistic gaming world within the four walls of your living room. This technology encompasses an assembly of projectors, depth cameras and Kinect units functioning together to display interactive gaming content into our living spaces. RoomAlive is currently at a prototype stage, but if this technology makes it to the market, it might entirely change the way we perceive the concept of gaming.

There are three games shown in the video below, Whack-A-Mole, Robot Attack and Traps which give us just a small taste of what this technology can do, as the potential of RoomAlive is significantly higher. Here are a few details Microsoft Research shared on this project: “The basic building blocks of RoomAlive are projector-depth camera units, which can be combined through a scalable, distributed framework. The projector-depth camera units are individually auto-calibrating, self-localizing, and create a unified model of the room with no user intervention. We investigate the design space of gaming experiences that are possible with RoomAlive and explore methods for dynamically mapping content based on room layout and user position.”

“Finally, we showcase four experience prototypes that demonstrate the novel interactive experiences that are possible with RoomAlive and discuss the design challenges of adapting any game to any room.” RoomAlive is currently a work in progress, but the thought of playing big titles such as Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed in such a unique way is pretty crazy and will make this technology highly desirable. The guys from Microsoft Research seem to have found a fun and intriguing gaming alternative, and it is possible that RoomAlive will not prove so costly to implement by game developers.