Features// Illumiroom: The Next Xbox's Big Innovation

Who says there won’t be any innovation at Microsoft’s Xbox Reveal event tonight? The tech giant made (metaphorical and physical) waves with its Kinect motion sensing camera in 2010, and with its next-generation console it plans to explore beyond traditional gameplay boundaries with Illumiroom.

Illumiroom is a gaming implementation of Microsoft’s 2012 patent called Environmental Display - a method of transforming the room in which you are consuming content by way of light projections. In the Xbox’s case, this means that game worlds can be displayed around your living room, outside of your TV screen.

The technology works by placing an “ultra-wide field of view device” on a coffee table, facing the wall so that it can cover a large area around the TV. Microsoft demonstrated this some time ago using current-generation technology - an Xbox 360 hooked up to a Kinect peripheral, which was in turn tied to a projector. The experiment resulted in the promotional video below.

At its base level, Illumiroom can project a single-tone colour onto the wall of your TV, surrounding the area in a hue that matches the mood of the game. Playing something like Borderlands, for example, could result in the TV area having a harsh white light projected onto it, giving your living space more of a cartoon feel. Playing a snow level in a platformer, though, will allow Illumiroom to project snowflakes that flutter around the screen.



More impressively, Illumiroom can extend field of view, so that your TV screen isn’t the only focal point of your game. The technology will be able to project game scenery in a variety of ways: either as a full-colour representation of the world around your character, or with a high-contrast wireframe look.

And it doesn’t have to project an entire environment either. Illumiroom can limit itself to certain graphical effects or gameplay elements, which are dynamically projected and move around the room as you explore the game world. For example, an FPS can choose to only project enemy weapons fire, with bullets whizzing beyond the TV screen - or key markers can be projected outside the normal field of view, improving navigation. For those playing deathmatch and looking for weapon pickups, this sounds ideal.

Illumiroom doesn’t sound like too much of a big deal on paper - it seems like you’re going to need an additional peripheral to take advantage of it, and its performance appears to be at its best with the lights off - but it certainly shows promise. With Kinect failing to appeal to core gamers, this could well be a product that could improve immersion in the more engaging titles like Call of Duty, whilst also offering the same technical wizardry that could wow casual players.

As an experiment, Illumiroom impresses. Its potential is very intriguing. But as Kinect proved before, real-world implementation of the tech could prove to offer very different results. If Microsoft doesn’t unveil this promising peripheral in tonight’s Xbox Reveal event, we’ll no doubt see it at E3.