Microsoft’s vision for the future of gaming transforms your living room to make it part of the game

It’s tough to know exactly what Microsoft (MSFT) has in store for its next-generation Xbox (codenamed “Durango“), but that hasn’t stopped PatentlyApple from unearthing technologies that the Redmond-based company is dreaming up. Microsoft’s patent filed in the first quarter of 2011 and made public recently by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office outlines the use of an “Environmental Display” aka “wide-angle RGB projection display device configured to project a peripheral image in a 360-degree field around the environmental display.” Basically, the walls of a room can be cloaked with game graphics that act as an extension of an HDTV. When combined with Kinect for depth-tracking, players can be immersed into a virtual reality-like experience without the need for cumbersome headgear. As with most patents, Microsoft’s doodles are just ideas and there’s no telling if such a concept is in the Xbox’s near future or not, but one can dream.

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