Steven Schkolne tells us why he’s returning to his immersive creativity roots with his latest VR “passion project” 3dSunshine – a tool he says will let gamers edit and enhance their favourite games in virtual reality.
Steven Schkolne is a rogue yeti. After graduating with a Computer Science PhD from Caltech he launched a successful international art career and built a thriving digital app agency. Now, with 3dSunshine, he’s returning to his grad school roots building a 3d system that turns gamers into game designers.
I’m going to start with an embarrassing admission: I was not impressed by the DK1. I’d already spent 1000s of hours in VR, and my initial reaction was a very curmudgeonly “what’s new here?”. When I wrote my Caltech PhD dissertation in 2003, “virtual reality” was so out of fashion that I didn’t use the term. The VR bubble had grown throughout the 80’s, and burst gloriously in the 90’s. It was in this less than hospitable environment that I developed the world’s first full-body VR painting system. Yes, long before there was Tilt Brush and Quill, I made something called Surface Drawing.
Surface Drawing opened up 3d creation to amateurs. However, access was limited to the small number of venues where I could set up the expensive custom hardware. Today, Tilt Brush and others are bringing this experience to the masses, and I am moving forward with a project that I feel has even more potential than Surface Drawing. It’s called 3dSunshine, and it’s going to revolutionize gaming.
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Many in the VR community are excited by the live VR editing being developed by Unreal and Unity. My vision is to bring this ability to everyone, by taking live VR editing to your favorite hit game. We are quite far along with Minecraft, and have broken ground on connecting 3dSunshine to Grand Theft Auto V. When I started work on Surface Drawing, I never would have imagined that democratizing digital 3d design would have such a rich application in gaming. Thanks to substantial developments in the gaming ecosystem, today this application of VR is ripe with potential.
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Over the past year, with a small team I have managed to develop a completely new approach to VR creation – not modeled after painting, or sculpture, or existing CAD tools. We are developing a rich toolset based on the same principles that make Lego so accessible. These methods amplify Minecraft building 10x over vanilla MC. The metaphors are so solid, you don’t even need an HMD to drive them (a flat screen with motion controllers will suffice). And they are so general, there’s no reason not to go further.
We are expanding this solution to support GTA and, as we add more games to the platform, the creative process will become richer and more streamlined. I am working with some incredible talent, standing on the shoulders of giants in the VR and gaming communities. Avid VR fans have been raving about experiences like Fantastic Contraption and Office Simulator. It is no surprise to me that these are some of the best VR experiences — because building and making things in space is fundamentally improved by VR. It doesn’t just feel cooler. You can actually do things with computers that you could never do before at home. When we apply these incredibly intuitive techniques to modding our favorite game worlds, the potential is limitless.
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I am quite motivated by the mega-challenge of a generalized creative interface for building. And we think gamers really need a way to more easily build their worlds. So that every 3d game can become its own Little Big Planet in terms of community creation, sharing, and play. Everyone can build with Lego. It’s about time that everyone can, brick by brick, build and creatively expand their game universes.
We’re excited. We’re motivated. We have an awesome youtube channel chuck full of authentic content that goes far beyond your typical VR demo. If you are interested in this project, I want to hear from you. This is a passion project, and I love talking about it. Get in touch at steven@3dsunshine.com.
