Displaying games on a 9x9x9 LED cube

Many modern video games may put your character inside of a virtual 3D environment, but you aren’t seeing that in three dimensions — your TV’s screen is only a 2D display, after all. 3D displays/glasses and VR goggles make it feel more like you’re in the 3D world, but it isn’t quite the same as you have no control over focus. What would gaming look like in true 3D? Greg Brault built this 9x9x9 LED cube as a video game display to find out.

Brault actually built a similar 8×8×8 LED cube with some games 10 years ago, but this new version is a lot better. Not only does it have an additional 217 LEDs, but Brault took the time to create a kind of graphics engine to make game development easier. That’s so good that he was able to program a version of Doom that runs on the cube!

The new cube contains 729 WS2811 individually addressable RGB LEDs on custom PCBs and those are much easier to control than the standard RGB LEDs Brault used in the original cube. An Arduino Nano ESP32 board controls those LEDs on one ESP32-S3 core and the gameplay on the other core. It can play sound effects via a DFPlayer Mini board.

But the real power is in Brault’s custom 3D rendering engine. Building on the FastLED library, it has all kinds of functions and objects useful for programming graphics on the unique cube display. It is efficient enough to run games at a playable “framerate.” 

With that engine at his disposal, Brault was able to make a handful of games: Pong, Space Invaders, Pole Position, Snake, Asteroids, and even Doom. Seeing those reimagined to work in 3D is a real treat, so be sure to watch Brault’s demonstration videos.

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