MS Research: IllumiRoom *spin*

You need active glasses or dolby3D glasses for projected 3D.
Wobbling isn't 3D, it's an optical illusion. If you'd wobble the image at 240Hz all you'd get is a shaky blur.

 

A couple of Wiggle Gifs






Take a DLP projector and put a tilt mirror that shifts four times. The old DLP rear projection sets tilted once.

250ms first set of pixels
500ms second set of pixels
750ms third set of pixels
1000ms fourth set of pixels

 

And watch everyone in the room become nauseous and instant migraines.

 

They might be using the Samsung Spatial Optical Modulator technology.

 

That's not 3d, it's plain old parallax. You can wiggle the in-game camera to do this if you want.
It has nothing to do with the display, it would work equally with a 1953 CRT... or even a flipping book animation.

 

If its a SOM projector the lasers are VECSEL. Years ago Aram Mooradran made a big breakthrough with his NECSEL laser design. There was a very good WIRED article on his NECSEL laser and how it was going to change the world. That never happened. The way I understand the lasers can be fabbed cheaply.

This sounds like very plausible and affordable tech but we shall see.

 

It's the same thing. NECSEL (his own brand) is actually a VECSEL (the technology). The whole industry is still waiting for some kind of mass-production, it looks like Novalux failed to achieve that. Other companies are trying, I guess competition will bring down the price until it's lower than both conventional light sources and high power LEDs. But I doubt this laser source will actually create $99 projectors that are powerful enough to light up a room, let alone compete in brightness with a modern LCD TV shown in the above video, it's going to be expensive to do that. It wouldn't be the first time that MS comes out with a video that has absolutely nothing to do with the final consumer product. See Kinect. And even if the technology is ready, mass-production can still be a big problem... see the first year of bluray laser diodes.

 

Wow!!!!

 

MS, Google, IBM, etc. all do research into things that may not necessarily have any practical value. The value comes in if they find something during the research that may have value in the market. Things that weren't necessarily a reason or focus of the research.

Lots of cool stuff gets researched at those companies (and others) that never see's the light of day. Pretty cool when stuff does surface from time to time, however.

Regards,
SB

 

agreed it's like expanding my TV/game room. awesome

 

I'm guessing Samsung will be using QPC Brightlase. It's the company Mitsubishi used for the DLP Laser TV.
By now QPC probably is in good shape for low cost production.

 

I understand that but the release of that video, the fact that it is not conceptual demonstration with special effects applied, it is released publicly and in a form that suggests they have found value as an actual product for Xbox, tells me this is not just something they are experimenting on in hope of getting somewhere.
To me it looks like they already got somewhere and they are trying to find a way to make the solution affordable, effective and efficient for retail availability in the future

 

It'd just be a blurry image, or flickery. Or worse, a rainbow mess. A 180Hz DLP is projecting the same 60fps footage 3x to eliminate rainbow effects.

If there's any tech that's giving MS an advantage, it'd exist in the projector market itself also.

If there's any tech that's giving MS an advantage, it'd exist in the projector market itself also. Note there are cheaper laser projectors out there - that revolution happened, with projectors in mobiles and camcorders. They just aren't high res or bright yet. If they were, they'd have replaced lamp-based projectors.

Possibly, although the existence of the video doesn't really show that. MS have a patent. This is PR. Maybe they can drum up interest from 3rd parties for niche activities, rather than create a real home product? Even if they have a tech they want to introduce (which MS have always had with their RnD concept home - many, many techs that haven't yet made it to the mainstream), it would only be as an expensive extra like Sony's HVD. Maybe they can release it for £400 as a peripheral, but it's not going to be a standard component of Durango. It's way too costly and clearly niche.

Here's a concept vid from Sony showing Move's use in projection mapping tracked to a camera. It's somewhat different to MS's 3D scanning, but the same sort of idea with no special effects applied, released publicly. It's not a commercial project - just a proof of concept for PR. Like patents, the existence of a video doesn't mean the intention to create or release a product idea, and certainly it says nothing about the affordability of such a product.

 

microsoft has better stuff

Seems too much of "stray light" and much less of useful "resolution" to me.

 

You don't need resolution. It's operating in the peripheral vision.

 

I think this stuff is still under research, I don't think we know enough to pull of such "extra perceptual" stuff as it's portrayed.

 

Yes, we do. The retina doesn't have the same visual acuity (sensor density) across its surface, focussing solely on a tiny percentage area of high acuity in the centre. One of the devs (ERP?) here was talking about experiments in eye tracking and only drawing in high detail on the TV the part the eye can see, with the rest rendered at low quality and appearing the same to the user at considerable performance savings. This tech (as described in the patent) doesn't expect the user to look directly at the wall projections. That's one of the shortcomings, as the natural response to some motion in the periphery is to go look at it, but in the game you'd have to turn your avatar. It's pretty unnatural. Although 720p looks to be suitable to see something at a push. We can't expect a perfect solution in its first iteration, unless we wait to implement when the tech is perfected.

 

Kinetic was launch at a very afordable price compared to similar devices. This time Microsoft could surprise us again (I hope so).

 

Kinect was a software solution using ordinary optical parts. There's nothing that can be done in the projector space using software to make hardware perform more impressively. This demo is showcasing MS's software solution to scanning and transforming a projection. It's not a demo of a new projection technology, and that technology doesn't exist (unless someone has secretly developed it but doesn't want to win a massive share of the projector market by beating everyone else with a cheaper, brighter projector solution).

 

Back in August Samsung bought a projector technology company called bTendo. So Samsung has remained very intrested in developing projectors.