The Rube Goldberg Machine VR – HTC Vive

January 2016

Suleiman Alaoui and I wanted to make a creative tool for the room-scale VR of the HTC Vive.
There were some fun demos, but the ability to build was missing in the VR demos that were available at that time (January 2016).

This is a sandbox demo we made, with some physics and other weird experiments!

Create shapes (Cubes, spheres, pyramids, cilinders) or lights.
You can even create little creatures (stick figures) that have their own AI to make sure they don’t fall off of high surfaces or miss the jump to another block, as they climb and run around the things you build.
They don’t really have a purpose.

Next to sandbox mode, it also contains a minigame.
There’s a red ball that has to touch floating coins.
Building anything new or moving any object restarts the game and resets your score, though.

Build the world that guides the ball so it picks up as many coins as possible in one go.

Objects can be glued together and picked up as one.

Gravity can be turned off, which gives room for some weird physics.