A whole 3D world in your living room: Will Smart Dust (in the future) ensure that your house can respond to your emotions?
- Microsoft’s ‘Kinect’ sensor, coupled with range of projectors, could convert living room into virtual world
- Technology would likely revolutionise conference calls and business use
Microsoft’s team of researchers is looking to transform your living room into a futuristic Star Trk-style ‘Holodeck’.
In these images, revealed by a patent application published last month, Microsoft unveiled its vision for its future game consoles – but instead of watching the action through a typical computer monitor or TV, your walls come alive with the action.
The technology will use Microsoft’s Kinect sensor – which currently lets you control games by waving your hands at the television – to map out your room and your location within it, before a range of video projectors overlay a full and immersive 3D world over your surroundings.
So, instead of turning your TV on to play computer games, your whole living room – plant pots and all – could be transformed into a full 3D world from which you can hunt aliens on a distant planet or take part in epic Westerns.
Patently Apple, which reports on innovations by Apple and its competitors, spotted the patent application this week.
The Kinect will also be able to recognise the furniture in your room, either incorporating chairs and tables directly into the game, or masking them by adapting the video output to render the items invisible.
It conjures up an image where a gamer could literally turn around in their living room to see an enemy sneaking up behind them.
The Kinect has been one of Microsoft’s runaway successes of the last few years, beginning life as an accessory for the company’s Xbox games console.
Instead of being tied to a controller, players could use their body to control the action in a myriad ways – for instance virtually pulling back a bow and arrow, or dancing as the console rated how good (or bad) you are at copying on-screen celebrities.
The sacrifice of royal children … an old custom or a monstrous act of idiots?!
Prince Harry Returns to England from War Zone
Princes in the Tower
Richard III had eliminated the princes from the succession. However, his hold on the monarchy was not secure, and the existence of the princes would remain a threat as long as they were alive. The boys themselves were ostensibly not a threat on their own, notwithstanding Edward’s having been acclaimed King, but they could have been used by Richard’s enemies as figureheads for rebellion. Rumours of their death were in circulation by late 1483, but Richard never attempted to prove that they were alive by having them seen in public, which strongly suggests that they were dead by then (or at a minimum, not under his control—unlikely, since they would presumably still have been in the Tower). However he did not remain silent on the matter. Raphael Holinshed, in his Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1577) reports that Richard, “what with purging and declaring his innocence concerning the murder of his nephews towards the world, and what with cost to obtain the love and favour of the communaltie (which outwardlie glosed, and openly dissembled with him) … gave prodigally so many and so great rewards, that now both he lacked, and scarce with honesty how to borrow.”[2] Even at that, at the very least, it might have been in his political interest to order an open investigation into the matter. However as the brothers’ protector (having seized the elder boy at Stony Stratford and obtained the younger as ‘protectorate’ from his mother at Westminster), and clearly having failed to ‘protect’ them, he may have wished to avoid accusations of effective blame through incompetence even if the murder had been carried out by other parties. Many modern historians though, including David Starkey,[3] and Michael Hicks,[4] or writers such as Alison Weir,[5] do regard Richard himself as the most likely culprit. There never was a formal accusation against Richard III on the matter; the Bill of Attainder brought by Henry VII made no definitive mention of the Princes in the Tower, but it did include the accusation of “shedding of Infants blood”, which may be an accusation of the Princes’ murder (especially since there are no other “infants” Richard had ever been accused of killing).
