Doom launched on a volumetric voxel display

Graphics engineer at Weta Workshop James Brown has an interesting hobby – he creates amazing displays. This time he built a device that resembles a crystal ball that rotates and displays a flickering three-dimensional image. And launched Doom on it.

Image source: youtube.com/@ancientjames

We are not talking about classic Doom, but about its variant Voxel Doom, where each point of the game object is assigned a position in three-dimensional space, just like the points of a volumetric display created by an enthusiast. In reality, the display is not three-dimensional – it is an illusion. “It’s like a holographic fan, but instead of rotating a 1D strip to produce a 2D image, it rotates a 2D panel to produce a 3D image,” explained James Brown.

Initially, he planned that in order to create a three-dimensional image, the device should rotate at a speed of 300 revolutions per minute, but it later turned out that this was clearly not enough to produce smooth movement. In his microblog Mastodon, he showed several examples of how his 3D screen works. This is not only a Doom game, but also a lunar module show, these are skulls and dinosaur heads.