In 2022, I introduce you to James Brown, the Weta Workshop graphics engineer whose hobby is building amazing displays. Now, he’s created a crystal ball filled with glowing, swirling volumetric light — and of course he’s playing Disaster on top of it.
But not just Disaster. Voxel Doom, where every dot of the game’s graphics resides in 3D space, like the dots of the volumetric display he created.
As he explained on YouTube, the physical illusion is quite simple: “It’s like a hologram fan, but instead of rotating a 1D strip to produce a 2D image, it rotates a 2D panel to produce a 3D image.” In his Mastodon, he breaks it down a bit with visual aids:
Brown has been working on this for over a year: if I’m not mistaken, he introduced the project in August 2023 by channeling his inner Doc Brown, saying “If my calculations are correct, when this baby is get to 300rpm you’re going to see something serious.” But he’s since discovered it needs to spin faster than that for a smooth image, especially when he’s trying to film it. So keep your fingers crossed.
You can track his progress on his Mastodon, where he doesn’t exist it just is playing doom – you can find volumetric lunar landers and skulls and dino heads, for example. He also just published it on his YouTube:
GIF by Sean Hollister / The Verge; Video by James Brown
And yes, they can play Disaster.
