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Microsoft’s RoomAlive Turns Living Rooms Into Digital Playgrounds

Posted: 08 Oct 2014 06:00 AM PDT

The living room might become the living playroom thanks to a Microsoft prototype.

Recently, Microsoft Research has been tinkering with the idea of the living room as a natural extension of the video game experience. At CES 2013 the company debuted Illumiroom, a unique display technology that fills up the living room with images and lights beyond the borders of what's displayed on the television screen.

Starting today with the project's rebranding as RoomAlive, Microsoft intends to push the immersive experience of their concept to not just incorporate the background behind the TV, but the living room itself. RoomAlive uses a configuration of multiple Kinect sensors and projectors – as opposed to the single Kinect and projector pairing with Illumiroom 1.0 – to display content across several kind of surfaces, and better yet, can be interacted with.

Microsoft says that RoomAlive can auto-calibrate and find out the 3D geometry of any room in a matter or minutes; Transforming it into a large playroom, where users can touch, shoot at, or even kick objects, such as tiny little creatures or evil robots that where shown in the video demonstration below, that appear walls and floors.

It is pretty darn sweet, even if it's not near Star Trek "Holodeck" levels of amazing-ness where you can pretend to be Sherlock Holmes, but baby steps, of course. Baby steps.

The tech behind RoomAlive is far away from the consumer stage, and might be that way for a long time. Using the number of projectors that Microsoft does for its demo room is way above what most can afford, but for now it's an impressive preview of what the future of what the living room can be.

Source: Microsoft

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Find Out Where To Buy an iPhone 6 With This Nifty Site

Posted: 08 Oct 2014 05:00 AM PDT

As the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus sells out across the globe, a nifty new website helps you keep track of stock.

Shock! Surprise! The iPhone 6 and its bigger, better and bendier brother, the iPhone 6 Plus are really flippin’ popular. The two of them set new pre-order records and after just three days on sale the phones sold 10 million units. When Apple announced the two devices, wowing us all with their increased screen sizes and svelte bodies they also boasted that the phones would have a 50% better battery life that the iPhone 5S, they’d be 25% more powerful and the camera would also be capable of taking clearer, crisper shots. Good news for gamers and the selfie conscious then. It’s these features that have kept the iPhone 6 and the 6 Plus popular despite Bendgate and as a result, the phones have sold out. With this new website though, you can stay up to date on iPhone 6 stock.

Self-explanatorily called iStockNow, the site tracks iPhone stock across the United States. Sorry international Apple fans! It is a great tool if you’re in the US though and it covers iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus stock across Apple’s US many stores. Every Apple store in the country gets its own tag, colour-coded appropriately. Green is for go! That colour means that there are iPhones in stock. Red means that you’re out of luck and yellow means that a local Best Buy might have some iPhones on offer.

Furthermore, iStockNow also offers specifics about the phones that are available. Should the Apple store have any, that is. Click on the green tag and you’ll be able to find out which iPhone is available (be it it the 5S, 6, 6 Plus or whatever you’re looking for), which size the phone is (16GB, 32GB etc.) and you can even find out which carrier the phone is available on. If you’re focused on the aesthetic, iStockNow will even tell you which iPhone colours are in stock. So it’s pretty comprehensive then, follow the link below to check it out.

Source: iStockNow

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