Microsoft Gets Closer to Giving a 360 Viewing Experience

Remember the Holodeck on Star Trek? Seemed like a fantasy piece of tech that could never really happen right? Well it has been said that whatever the mind of man can conceive the mind of man can do and the can do for that just got a little closer.

Imagine turning any room into a 360 experience where every surface can become a viewing screen. It’s being developed by Microsoft and the prototype is called SurroundWeb, a device that will proposes to beam screens from a computer on to the walls of any room from browser tabs and maps to videos and photos.

The short of how the technology works according to Microsoft is this, a one-time setup procedure scans a room for projectable surfaces in about a minute, and then creates what they called the Room Skeleton. The skeleton includes furniture, objects and people, to make sure the web pages aren't distorted. It also uses a Kinect camera to map mouse clicks to hand gestures.

This is not the only project of this type that Microsoft has in the works. Microsoft's had also announced Illumiroom technology last year which uses the sensors and camera to beam images from games onto the wall and immerse gamers in fantasy lands.

Neither of these ideas are ready to release to the public quite yet but it does fuel the imagination.