In 2022, I introduced you to James Brown, the Wētā 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.
The man who put Doom in a Lego brick is now playing it on a volumetric voxel display
I want to touch it, but I also want to keep my fingers.
I want to touch it, but I also want to keep my fingers.
is a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
And not just any Doom, but 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 has been working on this for over a year now. 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 hits 300rpm you’re going to see some serious shit.” He’s since discovered it needs to spin a good bit faster than that for a smooth image, particularly when he’s trying to film it, so keep your fingers away.
You can follow his progress on his Mastodon, where he’s not just playing Doom — you can find volumetric lunar landers and skulls and dino heads, for example. He just published this to his YouTube, too:
When we first checked in with Brown, he’d just finished putting real computers inside Lego computer bricks:
GIF by Sean Hollister / The Verge; Video by James Brown
And yes, they can play Doom.
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