by Zach Beard, Sterling Ely, Jenica Rangos & Alok Menghrajani
2002

What this BVW world lacked in narrative, it made up for in sheer fun. (Ok, it was a bit glitchy, but BVW project isn’t?) The premise? Take a typical breakout/arkanoid/bricks style game, and make it not only 3D, but fully immersive. The player wears a headmount and holds a shield-like paddle with which they must hit a ball down corridors in all directions to break bricks. I’ve always wanted to play breakout like this, so it was pretty satisfying to build it so I could finally try it out.

In addition to painting the textures, such as on these virtual paddles, I built the real-life controllers for the game. Basically it was just a frisbee with a handle, a spot to mount a motion tracker, and a button to release the ball while using the grabby paddle.