Microsoft's RoomAlive Turns An Entire Room Into An Augmented-Reality Video Game

Microsoft Research has released a first look at their augmented reality gaming system, RoomAlive, onto YouTube.

Augmented reality has been used for rudimentary games on top of Taco Bell boxes, as well as for immersive story moments in games like Bravely Default. In the proof-of-concept video, we can see that RoomAlive takes it a step further, turning an entire living room into an augmented reality play space.

The video shows how the system is set up, and several different game concepts. They're all simple concepts, but this is a just a proof-of-concept after all. The video does evoke the immersive, holographic, futuristic games seen in works of science fiction over the years.

Check it out below:

RoomAlive is a proof-of-concept prototype that transforms any room into an immersive, augmented entertainment experience. Our system enables new interactive projection mapping experiences that dynamically adapts content to any room. Users can touch, shoot, stomp, dodge and steer projected content that seamlessly co-exists with their existing physical environment. 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.