Microsoft's Future of the Living Room Starring SuperTuxKart 82
New submitter Antoine.Stroll writes "Microsoft's concept of the living room's future doesn't include Master Chief apparently. In fact, it's starring several FOSS games including Red Eclipse and SuperTuxKart (video). Does FOSS just allow more possibilities for research and experimentation? SuperTuxKart had their 0.8 release last month. Go check out the website and download the game that Redmond's researchers couldn't resist. STK gets its Microsoft closeup at 48 seconds into the demonstration."
This is the full room projection tech detailed in an earlier story about the patents Microsoft filed relating to it.
Master Chief (Score:2, Interesting)
Master Chief makes his appearance at 55 seconds into the video. If only for a second. And I'm pretty sure the "immersive" parts of it are just visual effects created for the following clip that carry over.
In their defense, it's really cool and I'm sure it's hard for even the Microsoft Research people to get access to the source code for Xbox games >.
they needed source. (Score:4, Interesting)
they needed the source code to mess around with it.. to do the outside of the screen stuff.
BUT.. if you had a projector, why the fuck use the tv.
Re:they needed source. (Score:4, Interesting)
The ad appears to be showing some sort of rapid scanning and 3d compensation technology that allows for projecting an image onto a set of nonplanar surfaces (Like, say, living-room furniture) in a manner which still appears as a single coherent image when viewed from the player's position. It's a handy tech to have when you have an actual room for living in, rather than a room dedicated for gaming.
Re:they needed source. (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously? It wasn't obvious from the video? It's a simple enough concept: TV = small area, high resolution, high color fidelity = primary vision. Projector = large area, low resolution, poor color fidelity = peripheral vision / situational awareness.
I'd been playing with such an idea for years, but never set it up for lack of games that supported multiple monitors with wildly different and overlapping fields of view. I'm glad to see someone with some clout is finally thinking about it. Of course I think I'll still be buying an Occulus Rift before a projector.
Re:they needed source. (Score:4, Interesting)
BUT.. if you had a projector, why the fuck use the tv.
Because if you had an HD projector you probably wouldn't set its FOV to be covering most of your room, you would focus it onto a narrow screen. And if you did set it to a wide angle projection the center of the screen would be very low resolution.
This is a good use of a high pixel density display in the center of your view and a low pixel display for your peripheral view where your eyes aren't very focused anyway.
Re:Low FOV (Score:4, Interesting)
I use a tool (glIntercept) when debugging my OpenGL products that lets me disconnect the camera and fly around in the scene, on any OGL software, even closed source. It works by pre-transforming the projection matrix, essentially creating an additional modelview matrix...
The XBox 360 inside has the same low level control over the graphics being rendered...
To make nice reflections we use something called an Environment Map, or Cube Map. It's the same sort of tech that Google Street View uses. To make a real time updating reflection where what's reflecting isn't a fixed env map, simply render the scene to a texture from the object's perspective with a 90 degree FOV in each 6 cardinal directions, and use them as the env / cube map for the object.
So, any vantage point can be converted into a full 360 degree render from that camera's position. MS could take advantage of this technology to send the images to each projector automatically, for legacy games, and/or provide an API so that devs can take advantage of the feature directly -- maybe have an equipment loadout on one wall, health display on the right, Radar on the ceiling, etc.