VoXeR

## Idea

The Grid, a digital frontier. Try to picture your room space as a 3-dimensional grid of voxels, that is 3D pixels, but larger. Let’s say 20x20x20 cm. They can be either inactive (invisible, completely transparent) or active. In the active state they can be of whatever color, or material in general. They may be blinking, pulsating, emanating sound, etc. They can also move between adjacent, empty grid spaces. You could also think about this movement as deactivating one voxel and activating an adjacent one with the same properties as the one that was deactivated. They may also have various behaviours and interactions enabled on them.

Now take all of the above (and more) and imagine it being implemented in a scriptable fashion. One could then come up and implement a multitude of mini-games with their own level designs. 

Here are some examples of such mini-games:

- **Jewel-Collector**

A level consists of a set of voxels that are “gold” and can be collected by the player (or players, in local co-op or competitive) to earn points. The voxels might be visible all at once or appear subsequently as the player(s) collect the previous ones. Golden voxels can disappear after some time.

- **Color Finder**

During gameplay a random color is being called out. The player(s) need to look around and find voxels (or clusters of voxels) of that colour and hold on to them or else they will be eliminated. The “color” here could be generalised to different sets of types of objects, like foods, countries, sports, etc.

- **TwisterX**

Similar to the original, physical game of Twister, the player(s) need to subsequently position their limbs on the indicated voxels, which get randomly, albeit sensibly, selected.

- **Memory Tester**

Each round a pattern of voxels is presented to the player(s) for a few seconds and they must recreate it.

- **Beat Catcher**

Voxels are approaching the player(s) from various directions (or just in straight lines in front of them) and they need to “catch” them, to the beat.

- **DodgerX**

The player needs to dodge incoming obstacles, using their whole body.

- **Endless possibilities…**

With the generic concept of the Grid, developers and designers can come up with varying ideas for mini-games utilizing it.

*By using Scene Understanding / Scene Mesh, the Grid cells would of course be limited to the empty space within the room, so that we wouldn’t force players to reach out inside the furniture* 😉

Now, even though we have a 3D grid of voxels, some mini-games could be designed so that only voxels on a flat surface, like a floor or a table, are “in-play”. They could actually be some kind of pressure plates. In the case of the floor, the player(s) would be forced to play in a squatted, seated or on all fours positions, which could introduce some creative and fun gameplay, maybe even for outdoors.

Going even further with the scriptability, we could make it so that the mini-games, types of voxels, etc. would be created by the players themselves. Think **UGC - User-Generated-Content**, like in Roblox or Fortnite.

## SDKs, Frameworks, Tools

Meta SDKs: Passthrough, Scene, Mesh, Movement, Spatial Audio, Haptics, Shared Spatial Anchors

## Utilized Meta SDKs

- **Passthrough** - for the player’s comfort and better body awareness

- **Scene**, **Mesh** - for procedural generation of levels that makes sure the grid cells are not outside the room or inside the furniture

- **Movement** - for bigger challenge where the player needs to move their whole body, eg. for dodging obstacles 

- **Depth** - for an interesting gameplay where voxels can be hidden behind the furniture

- **Spatial Audio** - for audio cues where to find the next voxel (eg. in Jewel Collector)

- **Haptics** - for immersion and grab proximity feedback

- **Interaction** - for the User Interface

## Download

- itch.io: TODO

## What's next for VoXeR

- **Multiplayer** - definitely need to implement that, especially the local, co-located multiplayer

- **Gameplay** - fine-tune the feel of the mini-games

- **More mini-games** - moving waypoints, timed waypoints, etc.

- **Feet** - eg. for TwisterX, even if just for guidance

- Oh, almost forgot. Build a team and **get funding** 😉

## See Also

- http://www.marekstoj.com

- https://www.bodymindgames.com