The original Doom is a milestone in PC gaming history. Of course, that’s nothing modern, but its enduring popularity over the past three decades means it’s also this software you need to operate when experimenting with coding or electronics projects. But when I saw the game being played on a volumetric display, it didn’t give me any feelings of nostalgia—I saw the future of PC gaming.
If you’re wondering what a volumetric display is, it’s a device that consists of a strip or array of LEDs that are rapidly rotated. The image created by the lights changing in a streaming pattern fills the volume in front of you. In other words, it’s like a holographic display (think Star Wars).
A YouTuber who performs under the pseudonym Ancient was clearly fascinated by making Doom work on all sorts of tiny gadgets and displays, but their latest forays into volumetric display were really intriguing. I first saw their attempts ‘volume’ Doom a few months ago, but a recently released video shows just how much progress this modder has made.
There are some obvious limitations, however, the most notable of which is that the game’s draw distance (how far into the world you can actually see) is directly proportional to the size of the volumetric display. Ancient’s home system is quite tiny, so the draw distance Very tiny, worse than the first 3D games on the original PlayStation. You can see how the game and display compare in this video.
The other thing that is quite restricted is the display resolution. While it would be fairly effortless to add more LEDs to boost the number of pixels (or should I say voxels, given the nature of the display?), this simply makes the whole thing more complicated to program and probably heavier too, with the extra circuitry required.
Finally, there’s the issue of noise — the motor that powers the rotation, as well as the wind noise you hear when you remove the plastic dome while the display is spinning, are quite distracting.
But this is all completely understandable, and I don’t mention it as a criticism of what Ancient has managed to achieve. Their work is entirely self-funded and done in-house, and it’s all very impressive. If you want to see what’s possible when a lot more money is involved, check out Voxon VX2 DisplayYours for just $6,800. Honestly, it doesn’t seem much better than that Doom demo.
Either way, while we’re not about to swap our high-resolution gaming monitors for a spinning globe just yet, I dare say this could be a glimpse of what the future of PC gaming holds for us. Now all I need is a place for a volumetric display vast enough to show the full draw distance of Doom. Time to rip and tear!
