Illumiroom unlikely to feature in Xbox One’s future

The prohibitive cost and requirements of Microsoft’s Illumiroom technology have seemingly seen it phased out of Xbox One’s future.

Illumoriim uses projectors and cameras to extend a game’s visual area beyond the confines of the TV. This has many uses – the screen itself can be extended to cover an entire wall or a user’s room can itself be visually distorted according to what is occurring in-game at the time.

But hopes that Illumiroom would be integrated into Xbox One appear to have faded.

"I wouldn’t expect you’ll see that,” head of product planning for Xbox One Albert Penello told AusGamers. It’s very, very cool tech but it’s, like, for a consumer, it requires projectors and things.

It’s really super-neat if you’re in the lab and you’ve got Microsoft money and you could totally set up this awesome lab, but… we looked at it, but for an average customer it’s, like, thousands of dollars."

The Illumiroom technology was first demoed in January this year, causing great excitement.

By May it was being tipped as a key factor in Microsoft’s next-gen gaming vision, with some onlookers even predicting that it would be named as a central selling factor for the then-unnamed Xbox One.