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According to a posting this morning on the Microsoft Blog by "Microsoft storyteller" Steve Clayton, Mundie (right) visited both Duke University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) earlier this week. Mundie is said to have provided "a large stereoscopic 3D presentation that showed some of the possibilities of human-scale computer interaction."Writes Clayton, "He showed what it might be like to interact with your computer when it is bigger than you -- like the size of a room. Sadly, unless we send each of you a set of 3D glasses its hard to recreate the experience, so youll have to trust me on this one when I say it was pretty incredible. Craig was able to walk into a 3D world where he could shop and play games, interacting with people in both the physical and virtual environment in a very natural way."
Reporting on the MIT event, Deborah Chen, a staff writer for MIT's The Tech, writes, "With a few expert waves of his hand, Mundie opened a virtual room containing the contents of his aunt's wish list. He selected a pasta maker, then zoomed in and rotated the image."
Mundie was able to expand the pasta maker image by widening his arms, making hundreds of internal parts visible. He was also able to place the item in a box for purchase, Chen adds.
According to The Tech and a similar IDG News Service report on the MIT event, attendees at the talks were themselves able to don 3D glasses and follow along with Mundie in virtual worlds. Another demonstration is said to have involved a "Player Participation TV Series," in which 3D avatars were able to change the course of a story in real time.
The computer or computers behind Mundie's demonstrations were not detailed, but The Tech's Chen describes the technology as being based on the Kinect controller (above) that goes on sale next month. A $150 add-on for the Xbox 360, the device contains a camera, audio sensors, and motion-sensing technology. It has the ability to recognize faces and voices, and tracks 48 points of movement on the human body at up to 30fps, Microsoft says.
The technology will soon be employed for much more than gaming, according to Mundie. He reportedly cited the example of a surgeon in an operating room using hand gestures to update patient information on a computer, while still keeping the environment sterile.
Meanwhile, an approach to whole-room 3D computing that doesn't require glasses was recently shown off by South Africa's Rudie Shepherd, one of the winners in Microsoft's embeddedSPARK 2010 Summer Challenge. His "RoomBox" device employs a rotating projector and a Windows Embedded Standard 7-based computer to fill a teenager's room with projected touchscreens. (For details, see our earlier coverage, here.)
Further information
For further information on Microsoft's Kinect controller for the Xbox 360, see the company's fact sheet in DOC format, here, and its Microsoft Store product page, here.
