A longgggggggg time ago, there were leaked documents that were supposedly for the upcoming new Xbox console. In those said documents there was a somewhat weird and very futuristic looking diagram that depicted a virtual reality type of concept for the console. Of course, most of us took that with a grain of salt. I mean, VR for the Xbox is a pretty farfetched idea at this stage. But Microsoft proved us wrong, well… kind of.
The company has team up with Samsung to give us IllumiRoom (yea, I’m not fond of this name at all). Basically the device would extend the area of you TV screen, so that it projects throughout the entire room. It looks as if you still see all the main happenings within the main screen, meanwhile the extended area of whatever scene your in within your game projects everywhere else in the room.
Not exactly what I was thinking in terms of VR, but it’s a step there. But one has to think, wouldn’t it be really distracting (read: annoying) for all of that to be happening while you’re trying to focus on a game? I guess we will have to wait and see what comes of this. As of right now this is on a proof-of-concept from the Microsoft Research team, so who knows if this actually comes out anytime soon. However it’s great to see Microsoft trying out new things.