CES: Microsoft IllumiRoom Makes Your Room a Screen

During Samsung’s keynote at CES today, Microsoft unveiled IllumiRoom,
a new technology that turns the entire room around your TV into an
extension of the screen. As explained on Microsoft’s official site,
IllumiRoom uses Kinect and a projector “to blur the lines between
on-screen content and the environment we live in allowing us to combine
our virtual and physical worlds.”

Microsoft explains that IllumiRoom “augments the area surrounding a
television screen with projected visualizations to enhance the
traditional living room entertainment experience” and “can change the
appearance of the room, induce apparent motion, extend the field of
view, and enable entirely new game experiences." Kinect captures the
geometry of a room and adapts projected visuals “in real-time without
any need to custom pre-process the graphics.”



In a video demo shown off during Samsung’s keynote, Microsoft showed
off several different applications of the technology, noting that the
footage was “captured live and is not the result of any special effects
added in post production.”

IllumiRoom appears to be the realization of the immersive display experience Microsoft patented last year, which aimed to make gaming “more realistic” and eliminating “out of context images” that sit next to your TV.

Whether or not IllumiRoom will tie-in with next Xbox or the next generation of Kinect remains to be seen, but Microsoft says more details will be revealed at the ACM SIGCHI Conference in Paris in April.