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World Builder (high quality)

BranitFX
Other
YouTube
Cited on HN 3 times, 2014–2016, never outright recommended score 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

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.

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.

“just 7 years ago this level of world building was science fiction” (HN, 2016)

3 citations · Other

3 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@wildpeaks Oct 2014 Cites it
on HN thread Live Coding in VR with Oculus Rift, Firefox WebVR, JavaScript, Three.js [video]
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]
Sci-fi short about editing the world in VR
@rayalez Dec 2014 Cites it
on HN thread The Humane Representation of Thought [video]
Read more
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.
Example of VR plus mocap manipulating a virtual space
@rawnlq Jun 2016 Cites it
on HN thread Unreal Engine 4.12 released
Unity has something similar: [link] Man, just 7 years ago this level of world building was science fiction: [this video]
Shows VR world building once seen as science fiction

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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