This is how it starts, guys. (Photo: screencap)

Coming soon to a CES recap near you: Microsoft is twerking that Kinect technology just as fast as it can, creating all kinds of weird futuristic use cases to help separate you from your hard-earned dollars.

Fast Company reports that Microsoft Research has created something called the "Illumiroom," which promises to splash the "Call of Duty" combat experience all over your living room walls. (Given that this idea is still in the "proof of concept" stage, it's not too late to change the name, hint hint.)

Here's how it works:

A Kinect scans the shape of a room, then Illumiroom uses 3-D projection to paint your walls and furniture with images, breaking the borders of your TV like a dam bursting a river of pixels into your living space.

All Microsoft would tell Fast Company about the technology is that it can “change the appearance of the room, induce apparent motion, [and] extend the field of view.” There's a video demonstrating how it works, with a dude playing a first-person shooter and a woman playing what looks like Mario Kart, naturally.

Meanwhile, Gizmodo reports that PrimeSense, the company that created the technology inside the Kinect, is busy working away on their next generation creation: the Capri, motion-sensor technology that's extra small and therefore embeddable in a wider range of gadgets. According to Giz: "It basically enables a future in which you are some kind of Jedi or wizard, casually waving your hand at things to make them work."

All we want to know is: Didn't anyone at Microsoft and/or PrimeSense ever read "The Veldt," the classic Ray Bradbury short story about how three kids basically go feral when they're given a virtual reality playroom? Might want to download that one to your Kindle.

(Photo: Reddit)

With 3.8 billion pageviews and 46 million unique visitors, Reddit CEO Yishan Wong published a post to the Reddit blog asking users to buy beefed-up premium memberships in order to support the growing site. [Reddit Blog]

A handful of geography professors took some of the racist tweets sent out after President Obama's re-election and mapped them. It will surprise no one that the majority of these tweets were clustered in the Southeast U.S. [Floating Sheep]

Facebook's hardware team wants to build biodegradable servers. [Wired]

A project out of Microsoft Research translates English into Mandarin in the same voice. [Technet]

Now you too can own your very own Goatse email address. [Gawker]

(Photo: Microsoft)

Why do Nigerian scammers say they're from Nigeria? A Microsoft researcher investigates. [Hacker News]

Now you can read through a user's Twitter stream without all those annoying @ replies to randos clogging it up. [Twitter Blog]

Oops. Microsoft forgot to tell its PC partners about that little thing called the Surface tablet. [Reuters]

Facebook's head of mobile told the audience at Le Web that the company is trying to copy Path. Cool story, bro. [TechCrunch]

The Daily Dot rounds up some of the more embarrassing moments in Reddit's history. [Daily Dot]

LinkedIn is being sued for that unfortunate password hacking scandal. [VentureBeat]

Ms. Chayes (Wikipedia)

Looks like Microsoft is the next tech behemoth to extend their empire to our fine city. According to All Things D, the company has a vast network of research institutions, and its newest campus will be located in New York. Though the team has yet to find a NYC office, the new branch will be the 13th addition to the research squad.

The research lab will be staffed by many former Yahoo employees, including online social behavior researcher Duncan Watts and machine learning expert John Langford. Jennifer Chayes, a mathematical physicist, will run the New York lab in addition to the one she already helms in Boston.

According to the New York Times:

The 15 recruits, [Ms. Chayes] said, are just the start of the build-up of Microsoft’s research arm in New York. And the lab is looking to forge partnerships — visiting and consulting researcher relationships — with Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University, Rutgers University and the planned Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute.

Apparently Ms. Chayes is a big fan of some of Silicon Alley's recent tech boosting initiatives. She also told the NYT that there is "a groundswell of technology in New York. And we want to be in the places around the world where there is great science and technology."

An earlier version of this piece erroneously stated that Duncan Watts and  John Langford were laid off from Yahoo. Betabeat regrets the error.