Wonderstructs

Sculpture in action
Top of conveyor leading to a switch
Loop de loop
Xylophone in foreground
Ball leaping into a funnel, several corkscrews

Inspiration

Ten years ago, my brother and I launched Wonderstructs, a kit for making wooden Rolling Ball Sculptures that go on your wall. Ever since we got the Meta Quest headsets, we had thought how fun it would be to be able to make this kind of sculpture in virtual or mixed reality. The inspiration for Wonderstructs were the many kinetic rolling ball sculptures by artists like Shab Levy and George Rhoads. With Wonderstructs Mixed Reality, we can even go beyond our original wall mounted kit and let you build sculptures that fill an entire room!

What it does

With Wonderstructs AR, you simply assemble the parts from a virtual Wonderstructs kit into the sculpture of your dreams. The physics are active from the minute you start up the app. The interface is intuitive and fun.

How we built it

We used the Godot game engine, and the Jolt physics engine to build the app.

Challenges we ran into

Creating an easy to use and intuitive UI.
Customizing the physics integration with Godot to get the features we needed.
Keeping performance consistent with many parts in the sculpture

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Achieving a realistic look
Making the physics feel real and fun
Making it intuitive to use

What we learned

The Godot engine is fantastic, and GDScript makes prototyping fast and fun
Frame rate is super important for immersiveness
Focusing on mixed reality solves a key problem - locomotion. The user simply walks around the room.

What's next for Wonderstructs

Adding more parts and options for various parts
Add support for co-located multiplayer
Add support for room entities
Creating a website for users to share creations and download the creations others have made
Enhancing the app until you can build whatever Rolling Ball Sculpture you can imagine!

We will be posting new sculptures here for you to download and try

Wonderstructs Sculptures