During Samsung’s keynote at CES today, Microsoft unveiled IllumiRoom, a new technology that turns the entire room around your TV into an extension of the screen. As explained on Microsoft’s official site , IllumiRoom uses Kinect and a projector “to blur the lines between on-screen content and the environment we live in allowing us to combine our virtual and physical worlds.”

Loading

Microsoft explains that IllumiRoom “augments the area surrounding a television screen with projected visualizations to enhance the traditional living room entertainment experience” and “can change the appearance of the room, induce apparent motion, extend the field of view, and enable entirely new game experiences." Kinect captures the geometry of a room and adapts projected visuals “in real-time without any need to custom pre-process the graphics.”In a video demo shown off during Samsung’s keynote, Microsoft showed off several different applications of the technology, noting that the footage was “captured live and is not the result of any special effects added in post production.”IllumiRoom appears to be the realization of the immersive display experience Microsoft patented last year , which aimed to make gaming “more realistic” and eliminating “out of context images” that sit next to your TV.Whether or not IllumiRoom will tie-in with next Xbox or the next generation of Kinect remains to be seen, but Microsoft says more details will be revealed at the ACM SIGCHI Conference in Paris in April.

Andrew Goldfarb is IGN’s associate news editor. Keep up with pictures of the latest food he’s been eating by following @garfep on Twitter or garfep on IGN.