Thinking about LEGO in movies, TV shows, and videogames, I thought the natural next step in that progression was a LEGO VR title where we can build brick-by-brick in virtual reality. I didn't find such a title [Update: found one] but searching for LEGO VR did lead me to an interesting piece of utility software. The top-line advertising pitch for vorpX is its capability to put non-VR titles in a VR headset.

It's pretty easy to project 2D images into a VR headset's 3D space. There are lots of VR media players that projects movies on a virtually big screen, and vorpX documentation says it can certainly do the same as the fallback solution. But that's not the interesting part, vorpX claims to be able to project 3D data into a VR headset in 3D. This makes sense at some level: games engines are sending 3D data to our GPU to be rendered into a 2D image for display on screen. Theoretically, a video driver (which vorpX pretends to be) can intercept that 3D data and render it twice, once for each eye in our VR headset.

Practically speaking, though, things more complicated because every game also has 2D elements, from menu items to status displays, that are composited on top of that 3D data. And this is not necessarily a linear process, because that composited information may be put back into 3D space. Back-and-forth a few times, before it all comes out to a 2D screen. Software like vorpX would have to know what data to render and what to ignore, which explains why games need individual configuration profiles.

Which brings us to the video I found when I searched for LEGO VR: YouTube channel Paradise Decay published a video where they put together a configuration for playing LEGO Builder's Journey in a Oculus Rift S VR headset via vorpX. Sadly, they couldn't get vorpX working with the pretty ray-traced version, just the lower "classic" graphics mode. Still, apparently there's enough 3D data working for a sense of depth on the playing field and feeling of immersion that they're actually playing with a board of LEGO in front of them.

For first-person shooter type of games using mouse X/Y to look left-right/up-down, vorpX can map that to VR head tracking. When it's not a first-person perspective, the controls are unchanged. VR controller buttons and joysticks can be mapped to a game controller by vorpX, but their motion data would be lost. 6DOF motion control is a critical component of how I'd like to play with LEGO brick building in VR, something vorpX can't give me, so I think I'll pass. It'll be much more interesting to experiment with titles that were designed for VR, even if they aren't official LEGO titles.