Microsoft Research, a department in Microsoft that does the obvious has today revealed a new proof-of-concept for the Xbox, IllumiRoom. The system is designed to push the boundaries of your living room by using space outside of the screen to help project visualisations, supposedly to enhance your entertainment experience.

IllumiRoom uses a Kinect for Windows camera and a projector to blur the lines between on-screen content and the environment we live in allowing us to combine our virtual and physical worlds. For example, our system can change the appearance of the room, induce apparent motion, extend the field of view, and enable entirely new game experiences.

Our system uses the appearance and the geometry of the room (captured by Kinect) to adapt the projected visuals in real-time without any need to custom pre-process the graphics. What you see in the videos below has been captured live and is not the result of any special effects added in post production.

The project was designed by Brett Jones, Hrvoje Benko, Eyal Ofek and Andy Wilson, however is not yet fully functional for consumer usage. The team has stated on the Research website that they plan to have more information and a paper explaining all the details at this years ACM CHI 2013, a conference on human-computer interaction in Paris. You can check out the video below for a brief look at the new technology, or head over to the official website for more.