Microsoft Research's RoomAlive lets you immerse any room in your house and bring it to life

Dave W. Shanahan

Microsoft Research's RoomAlive lets you immerse any room in your house come alive

Microsoft Research’s latest project, RoomAlive, lets you turn any room in your house into your personal gaming experience. Though it is merely a proof-of-concept at this time, users can interact with the walls and floor of the room with frightening accuracy. It is a given  that not everyone will be able to afford to take advantage of this technology in it current incarnation, but the fact that this is a concept is a great new way to experience games.

Using several projector-depth cameras, along with several Kinect sensors, the projectors and Kinect sensors create a complete layout of the room, creating a unified layout of the room without the need to change anything. Just set up the equipment and RoomAlive will do the rest. RoomAlive is now available as a downloadable toolkit (download here), and it is available for anyone with a little programming skills can create their own art projects or Holodeck-style interactive games or apps.

RoomAlive is not limited to just one room, it can also be utilized to take over bigger spaces like a theater or possibly even an entire building. No telling what applications RoomAlive could have with HoloLens, but check out the RoomAlive proof-of-concept video and see for yourself.