By Leo Stiles
You can file this one in the ‘may never make it to product’ category but there is no denying that the most recent concept to come out of Microsoft’s research labs is anything other than brilliant.
Their latest project is called Light Space and appears to be a fusion of the company’s corporate touch screen tables and their upcoming Kinect camera for the Xbox 360. Essentally a projector combined with a 3D camera and sensor array, Light Space turns any surface into an interactive screen and generates windows as 3D objects that can be manipulated and passed from surface to surface.
The project is very early in the design stages but already it looks impressively responsive as you can see in the video below with objects being passed around the room and from person to person with ease.
Light Space doesn’t just manipulate images and video; it also maps the room in three dimensional space which can then be used to project hotspots in the real world room for things like menus and other interactive modules. An obvious application for this would be a gesture based light dimmer but the possibilities are endless.
The whole thing does have a Kinect vibe about it and after this impressive demonstration, we think that there might be some real potential in 3D cameras, something which should bode well for future iterations of Xbox.
Sadly, if you are already salivating at the thought of an interactive man cave, you might be in for a wait as no practical applications or products have been announced, but feel free to let your imagination run riot. We just hope they figure out holographic projection so we can finally live out our Tony Stark fantasies.
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