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SurroundWeb Displays Web Pages in Your Living Room

Microsoft Research is showing off a new 3D browser whose destination is not a laptop, phone or watch, but rather, our entire living room. The new prototype, called SurroundWeb, finds surfaces in a living room and transforms them into interactive displays. Using projectors and depth cameras, SurroundWeb will map content by examining the surfaces that are appropriate for projection, distinguishing between couches, coffee tables and living room walls. They even show a cool concept demonstration for detecting a Coca-Cola can. For example, if you’re playing a racing game, you can see game related race stats around the T.V. while also showing a Wikipedia article about the race circuit on an adjacent wall.

The abstract for SurroundWeb:

We introduce SurroundWeb, the first least-privilege platform for immersive room experiences. SurroundWeb is a “3D Browser” that gives web pages the ability to display across multiple surfaces in a room, adapt their appearance to objects present in that room, and interact using natural user input.

SurroundWeb enables least privilege for these immersive web pages by introducing two new abstractions: first, a Room Skeleton that enables least privilege for room rendering, unlike previous approaches that focus on inputs alone. Second, a Detection Sandbox that allows web pages to register content to show if an object is detected, but prevents the web server from knowing if the object is present. SurroundWeb provides three privacy properties: detection privacy, rendering privacy, and interaction privacy while simultaneously enabling Web pages to use object recognition and room display capabilities.

Check out the full paper fore more details:
SurroundWeb: Least Privilege for Immersive “Web Rooms”

If some of this looks familiar, you may be thinking the IllumiRoom project shown off by Microsoft a year ago. Some really awesome work from our friends at Microsoft Research.