News - Microsoft IllumiRoom: a must-have Xbox 720 peripheral?

[HEXUS]

IllumiRoom extends your video game screen to the rest of the room. Check out the new video.

Read more.

[watercooled]

Certainly an interesting concept, but I doubt it will come cheap. That, and I don't know many people who have their room set up so perfectly i.e. TV against a flat wall directly perpendicular to viewer with a coffee table and adequate distance between them.

[Lee H]

Remember the kinect videos? They had people playing games with proper motion detection and what comes to the market...

A scaled back 'fisher price' edition of the technology.

I bet this will be the same is just a bit like the philips Ambx technology when it's released

[watercooled]

I was thinking along those lines TBH.

[Bagpuss]

NO.........just stop it FFS, all I want is a box and a controller and play the damn game.

All this crap like Kinnect, now this, sums up everything that's wrong with the Xbox brand today.

[harryj1995]

Yet another thing I want and probably wont be able to afford

[bobfoc]

This is very like a more advanced version of Philips Ambilight tech they use on their tvs.

I can see a lawsuit coming shortly!

[Whiternoise]

Remember the kinect videos? They had people playing games with proper motion detection and what comes to the market...

A scaled back 'fisher price' edition of the technology.

I bet this will be the same is just a bit like the philips Ambx technology when it's released

As someone who works in 3D imaging tech, there's one big reason for this: reliability.

While the underlying technology behind the Kinect/Primesense Carmine is relatively robust, you want to make sure that it works in 99.9% of environments because otherwise the product is a sure flop. To call it Fisher Price is a bit unfair, more like it makes less assumptions and only does exactly what it's supposed to do. You still have the same hardware underneath, but the applications are designed to make sure that people aren't disappointed when they try to play star wars and keep cutting their friend's head off in edge use-cases.

The same will go for this. You need a projector, which is expensive to start with, and if your wall is either full of occlusions, is strongly absorbent to infrared or just doesn't respond well to the calibration then the experience will be less than amazing. If it ends up in living rooms, it's more likely to end up a bit like the ambient light televisions (as you say). Most of this is heavily gimmicked - I don't want to watch an out of focus movie on my wall, nor do I want to see the map extended outside my television - just buy a projector and a screen. What is really really cool, however, is the ability to send bullets out of the screen or highlight things out of your field of view.

All the people saying this is a killer 720 feature are talking nonsense, you can do this with something capturing the video stream and a 360. https://research.microsoft.com/en-us...013_BJones.pdf, they actually cite Philips' technolgy.

PS - note the Altoids tin, this is proper hackery, folks!

[Lowe]

As a proof of concept I really like the idea, the gunshot 'wobble' effect I thought was really effective - and not least because my own living room would be pretty much perfect for this given a change of paint on the back wall.

[Pleiades]

This goes way beyond Ambilight (which I have on PC) and personally I love all these 'gimmicks' and innovations ;-)

But the number of people who could realistically afford or have the correct room dimensions would seem to be relatively small (as a percentage of the console userbase) I'm guessing...

But I love Ambx when it works, and this appears to be a real advance on that. Maybe it'll get Phillips back to supporting Ambilight on PC in competition (wishful thinking LOL)...

[CK_1985]

Some of the effects were very gimmicky - the 'full context' projection just looks disorientating, and the dual-shoot movie stuff was just plain silly.

But the ones that worked - the 'context selective' and teh visual wobble in particular - looked fantastic. I also liked the blended effects at the end - the Portal section looked great!

I hope this gains a bit of traction - if it can come down to a sensible price point, I think it would be fantastic fun to play around with. Might actually persuade me to buy an Xbox!

[Saracen]

"must have" peripheral?

That's a joke, right?

[TheAnimus]

"must have" peripheral?

That's a joke, right?

It's the post Wii world.

The Wii I think stunned MS and Sony, they were still firmly in the mindset of graphics, graphics, graphics, sound was all the mattered.

Then came along this disruptive little thing, it became the must have Christmas gift for many people, be they gamers who fondly remembered nintendo, or people with not yet teenagers. On launch day it was a friday, I turned up about 4 hours late for work, rather drunk, to be taken to the pub to drink more by my boss, because i'd got a second Wii.

They were a currency!

Suddenly the casual gaming market took note, the DS lite did quite well too, then the iPhone/iPad came along and invented casual gaming completely. The downside was that it had become a volume game. Churn out something relatively high quality, but you must get half a million plus users to begin to break even. The big software houses who obviously are not as efficient as the small bedroom/startup teams did not like this.

Something that can go in at a premium above these low margin games would be welcome.

The Wii had won praise from Daily Mail / Guardian types because apparently it was healthy, you weren't sat on the sofa any more, so the idea of the Kinect and PS Move look bloody good to them. It is also kinda cheap to develop for, most of the work for the Kinect dance game is covered in the skeletal tracking library, I'd imagine the songs are licensed on a per sale basis too.

This is just the next extension of that kind of thing, making games which are really quite striking when seen at an in store display, no focus on gameplay at all, as that doesn't help sell to the casual types.

It is an odd, sad, race to the bottom. But it also makes sense from the console producers point of view. The last generation were bad from their side. Really bad. Expensive to produce, and priced with no real upselling. Now you can have the Xbox 8 basic, which will make you feel like you shop at poundland, next to the much shiner premium with the 'must have' features that look impressive in store. Yet the core fan group will just by the basic saying that they don't want those stupid things.

I would be very surprised if MS produced these extra features at anything approaching cost price, where as the basic console probably will be.

So that is why we have this horrible things, a 'casual gaming race to the bottom' fuelled by up selling potential.

[Blademrk]

I like the bullet/explosion extrusion and the off screen tracking markers (which I think could be somewhat useful), the dimming (overhead) lights on the racing sim also looked pretty effective.

I thought the bullet wobble (where the room pulsed with each shot) could be a bit annoying (or cause motion sickness), and the furniture occlusion a bit pointless.

I see this as a feature (like the original Kinect) designed for the larger US living rooms rather than the small bedrooms which our consoles usually call home.

[Saracen]

It's the post Wii world.

The Wii I think stunned MS and Sony, they were still firmly in the mindset of graphics, graphics, graphics, sound was all the mattered.

Then came along this disruptive little thing, it became the must have Christmas gift for many people, be they gamers who fondly remembered nintendo, or people with not yet teenagers. On launch day it was a friday, I turned up about 4 hours late for work, rather drunk, to be taken to the pub to drink more by my boss, because i'd got a second Wii.

They were a currency!

Suddenly the casual gaming market took note, the DS lite did quite well too, then the iPhone/iPad came along and invented casual gaming completely. The downside was that it had become a volume game. Churn out something relatively high quality, but you must get half a million plus users to begin to break even. The big software houses who obviously are not as efficient as the small bedroom/startup teams did not like this.

Something that can go in at a premium above these low margin games would be welcome.

The Wii had won praise from Daily Mail / Guardian types because apparently it was healthy, you weren't sat on the sofa any more, so the idea of the Kinect and PS Move look bloody good to them. It is also kinda cheap to develop for, most of the work for the Kinect dance game is covered in the skeletal tracking library, I'd imagine the songs are licensed on a per sale basis too.

This is just the next extension of that kind of thing, making games which are really quite striking when seen at an in store display, no focus on gameplay at all, as that doesn't help sell to the casual types.

It is an odd, sad, race to the bottom. But it also makes sense from the console producers point of view. The last generation were bad from their side. Really bad. Expensive to produce, and priced with no real upselling. Now you can have the Xbox 8 basic, which will make you feel like you shop at poundland, next to the much shiner premium with the 'must have' features that look impressive in store. Yet the core fan group will just by the basic saying that they don't want those stupid things.

I would be very surprised if MS produced these extra features at anything approaching cost price, where as the basic console probably will be.

So that is why we have this horrible things, a 'casual gaming race to the bottom' fuelled by up selling potential.

Solid argument, beautifully precis'd.

Maybe (read that as probably) I'm in the minority that thinks a well-designed game features primarily on gameplay, and that even graphics and sound are only relevant to the extent that they enhance gameplay, and that this kind of tech is really a device looking for a reason to exist rather than a natural genesis from gameplay needs.

Just because we can do something doesn't mean we should. Personally, 3D TV falls into that category - the times when it genuinely adds to the "experience", the immersion in a program, is (IMHO) minimal, and the drive for 3D is an attempt to sell the tech by pure marketing. It may well be a successful drive, though.

[Meowdance]

Immersion? Maybe. Looks incredibly distracting to me.