Screen Shot 2014-10-06 at 10.51.15 AMGrowing up, I always wanted a holodeck. Heck, I still want a holodeck. If a new project is any indication, so do the folks at Microsoft Research.

RoomAlive is a new system that takes a room and turns it into one big screen that people can watch and use for gaming. Like Microsoft’s past IllumiRoom demo, which expanded the content on a TV to take in a whole wall, RoomAlive uses projectors paired with Kinect sensors to determine the layout of a room and the position of people in it.

Here’s a video that shows how it works:

Unlike that earlier system, which focused on only one wall, RoomAlive uses an array of projectors to envelop a whole room, along with software to detect surfaces, their orientations, and how they relate to the floor in the room. The project also includes tools for developers to create experiences for a RoomAlive setup using the Unity game engine, so people can develop their own RoomAlive content.

Sorry, early adopters, it’s just a prototype for now. No word on any prospect for commercial availability.

Screen Shot 2014-10-06 at 10.49.04 AMAt this stage of the research, it doesn’t seem particularly easy to set up RoomAlive. In order to cover surfaces in a room, users have to blanket their ceiling with an array of projectors and Kinect sensors that all slightly overlap with one another. Once the hardware is in place, the projectors will self-calibrate (assuming they overlap), but the setup Microsoft showed in its video looked pretty cumbersome.

Still, this has the potential to be a significant step forward when it comes to creating three-dimensional gaming experiences, especially at a time when more developers are interested in pushing beyond the limits of a traditional screen. Oculus and Sony have captured the imagination of many with their virtual reality headsets, and RoomAlive is the opposite side of that coin, using available space to display images rather than a headset.

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