Turning Virtual Games into Tabletop Games

January 8, 2012 - (SCI-TECH NEWS) Hack A Day, a website that features technological hacks, builds, projects, and how-to's, recently posted, "3D printing Minecraft worlds." What's Minecraft you might ask? It is a computer game where you inhabit a virtual world and are given building blocks to manipulate and build it as you please. As simple as it sounds, incredible creations have resulted  - from comical monuments to realistic historical and futuristic land and cityscapes.

Why settle for just playing a game on your computer? With computer-controlled manufacturing now in the hands of the average person, 3D models of in-game Minecraft creations become a reality on your desktop. More images can be found on the Mineways flickr collection.

The next step seemed logical. People wanted to build in reality what they were able to create virtually. Many people did so manually with Lego sets or even cardboard, but it got truly intriguing when people started to "print" them in 3D.  Hack A Day really explains this part best here in their post, including the software that bridges the game and the software used to instruct the 3D printers. They also included the below video which explains the "how" of capturing which section of your virtual world you'd like to make a reality, and then printing it out as a physical 3D model.

The 3D printers used aren't always specified but one project featured in their post was a mountain range produced with the open-source RepRap 3D printer. This printer is generally made by hobbyists and one machine can be used to print the connectors and many of the components for additional machines. The machine builds objects by heating a plastic filament and laying down layer upon layer until an entire object is completed.

The Zprinter 650 is a commercial rapid-prototyper (3D printer) and has been used similarly to create impressive  results using the Mineways software to export in-game designs to 3D printers. See the video below for a tour of the above pictured village.

What does this mean for the future of the gaming industry? As personal manufacturing becomes more accessible to the average person it's a good bet that game designers will start thinking ahead of how to help bridge the gap between the virtual world and the real world and perhaps entire games can be created with this sort of "foot-in, foot-out" possibility in mind. The possibilities are exciting and of course, so is the fact that regular people are the ones now pushing the boundaries of what's possible.