A still image of Doom on a volumetric display. | Photo by James Brown (@ancientjames)
In 2022, I introduced you to James Brown, the Weta Workshop graphics engineer whose hobby is building amazing displays. Now, he’s built a crystal ball filled with shimmering, spinning volumetric light — and of course he’s playing Doom on it.
But not just any Doom. Voxel Doom, where every dot of the game’s graphics lives in 3D space, just like the dots of the volumetric display he’s created.
As he explains on YouTube, the physical illusion is fairly simple: “It’s like a hologram fan, but instead of spinning a 1D strip to make a 2D image, it spins a 2D panel to make a 3D image.” On his Mastodon, he breaks it down a bit more with visual aids:
Brown’s been working on this for over a year now: if I’m not mistaken, he introduced the…