Once installed, RoomAlive can track you and your weapons while you hit, kick or shoot creatures. It can also project textures and cyber-critters onto your walls and furniture, transforming your den into a holodeck or a factory, for example. Another demo brought to mind the 3D game in the movie Her, with the player controlling a character that avoids killer "robots" emerging from your walls and floor. Finally, there's a game that requires you to physically dodge booby traps, with any failure resulting in a virtual bloody wound projected onto your body.

It looks very slick, despite still being far from an actual product you can buy. In any case, not too many folks could afford to rig up a room with multiple projectors and Kinects the way Microsoft did. Still, as with Oculus, it's not hard to see huge potential in the research -- not just in gaming, but also for fields like education or military training. And unlike the Rift, it could one day transform consoles into something that actually gets us off the couch.

[Image credits: Microsoft Research]