Watch: Brain-Melting Unity Demo Turns Polaroid Photos Into Slices of Interactive, Manipulable Reality

It's difficult to describe what's happening in this astounding Unity demo by game design student Matt Stark, but I'll go ahead and try: He's created an interactive world where the user can take a "Polaroid photo" of the surroundings -- and once taken, the photo becomes its own little interactive, manipulable, physics-enabled world.

As you might expect, Mark tells me he created this effect for a puzzle game he's working on. "I think the puzzles could be open-ended, allowing the player to approach them creatively," he tells me. "I'm at the stage of brainstorming level mechanics and trying to decide what the anatomy of a puzzle in the game should be." 

As for achieving this effect, here's how he does it:

"When the player takes a photo I duplicate the environment, make it greyscale and slice the meshes to remove anything outside the photo. When they place it into the world I slice the environment's meshes to make a hole for the photo." 

Or to put it another way, he puts a copy of the world on top of the world, and erases anything that would cause those worlds to overlap, until they're ready to do so. (If you know what I mean, and I'm not even sure I do.)

Matt says he may publicly release the code at some point. Metaphysicians are standing by.

Comments

[Joey1058]

Very cool!!!!

[CuffyX]

This is very clever. Very different, out of the rect and a genius mechanism.

[ocæon]

absolutely love this, getting a well balanced depth of the insertion and having the objects in it instantiate flawlessly.. i anticipate tasks like getting the right sized objects by being at the right vantage point, or tilting a room just right so the objects in it make a form that the facial recognition will be fooled by .. what do you mean 'polaroids don't have facial recognition'?