Sit on couch, look at screen. It’s the typical scenario for entertainment consumption – streaming a Batman movie, watching as he chases a villain through the noir-looking Gotham City. But what if the entire living room was transformed into Gotham City as you watched?
IllumiRoom, a research project from Microsoft Research, is working to blur the lines between physical and virtual – between your living room, and the game you are playing or movie you are watching. Using a Kinect sensor, researchers have developed a way to project visualizations to surround a display with an extension of what viewers are seeing on the screen – even if a game or movie’s source code is not available. The IllumiRoom prototype aims to enhance traditional viewing and gaming by creating an immersive experience.
“I’m fascinated with the ability of projectors and cameras to turn any object or any surface into an interactive experience,” says Hrvoje Benko of Microsoft Research in Redmond. “There are many other ways of providing augmented-reality experiences, but projection-based augmented reality intrigues me because it is inherently ‘gear-free’ and, very importantly, the experience is sharable.”
The IllumiRoom team won a Best Paper award at the Association for Computing Machinery’s 31st Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, in full swing now in Paris. Students and experts from more than 60 countries will attend the conference, including a large contingent from Microsoft Research presenting a total of 27 papers and 12 notes covering a broad spectrum of human-computer interaction (HCI) topics.
Jennifer Warnick
Microsoft News Center Staff