BranitFX
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2014–2016
9:16 · 3.3M views · Feb 25, 2009
World Builder is a short film by Bruce Branit in which a man uses holographic tools to build a world for the woman he loves.
Cited as a sci-fi vision of editing a world in VR, and a reference point for how VR and world-building tools have caught up.
3 comments from Hacker News
The interesting part is that a lot of what he is talking about is already possible. - You can use augmented reality or VR with something like Oculus to display things in 3D space. - You can use Motion Capture technologies, plus maybe some convenient remote-control/keyboard-like devices to put a human in that virtual space and manipulate things. Only 2 technologies(Oculus + Mocap) would be enough to accomplish something like this: this video Give a bunch of people oculus rifts and put them in the same virtual reality - and we have the dynamic stage he is talking about. They don't even have to be in the same room of course, we have 3D realtime MMORPGs and second-life that already solved that problem!! You could attend a virtual talk by sitting in your apartment with oculus rift on your head. And of course "downloading a room" instead of a book is already very doable. We already have computer games and engines. That room is like a video game level. Downloading it is not a problem, to explore it all you need is oculus and a simple game controller or a keyboard/mouse. And in terms of creating such content, the closest thing I can think of is 3D editors, like Maya or Houdini, especially houdini( [LINK] ), which is the brilliant combination of computer graphics and programming, that allows you to model and program dynamic things visually.
Reminds me of Worldbuilder [1], a scifi short about a VR interface for editing the world around you. I kinda like the "grab object & kiss to save" gesture: it wouldn't make sense in 2D but feels natural in VR, although "grab & push object in your brain" might be easier implement to represent a save function. this video
Unity has something similar: [LINK] Man, just 7 years ago this level of world building was science fiction: this video