We’re finding a new form of expression in the flying robots and breathing forests of our own virtual worlds.
Recently, a 23-year-old college student named Nick tried out a new pastime: building 3D virtual worlds. Q He got his hands on Dreams, a game by Media Molecule that gives people tools to create digital scenes—anything from a room filled with items to an entire landscape you can wander around in. There’s a tool for sculpting objects and another for animating them, and a unique visual programming language to tweak things. Daunting! But soon he’d made some remarkable stuff, which he shared via the game’s online interface. Q In only a few weeks, Nick became rather good at Dreams. I checked out one of his 3D worlds, in which you pilot a humanoid robot across a barren rocky planet, the whole place aglow in extraterrestrial moonlight. It gave me shivers—a tone poem of desolation. “With certain tweaks,” Nick told me, “I could get some rich lighting conditions to really wow the players.” Did he have any training in the field? Nope, “just a creative sponge,” he says.
This story is from the September 2019 edition of WIRED.
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This story is from the September 2019 edition of WIRED.
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