Microsoft Furthers Research into RoomAlive

Microsoft’s RoomAlive could turn your entire room into an interactive gaming environment. Microsoft Research developed RoomAlive approximately two years ago but I guess the guys over at marketing took a while to change the name from Beamatron and later IllumiRoom until finally they came up with something half decent.

The new demonstration video was released for this week’s ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) in Honolulu, Hawaii.

RoomAlive is an amalgam of two technologies: LCD projectors and Microsoft’s Kinect motion-tracking system. The system uses Kinect Fusion room-modelling technology and the Kinect constructs a detailed, depth-sensitive 3D map of the environment, including the walls, floor, furniture and anyone inside the room.

It then combines the room model with a plugin from the Unity game engine and a projector to display the imagery, which augments the look of the room and interacts with people inside it.