Step inside: every VYBE.ART piece is now one sentence from VR and AR

For its first month, everything on VYBE.ART lived behind glass. You could play a piece, bend it, put it on a timeline and render it, but it always stayed on the other side of a screen.

Then I opened my table tennis game and typed "make this into VR". Put on a Quest after that and you're not watching the game any more. You're holding the bat.

That's the whole feature. One follow-up, and a piece you made from a sentence comes off the screen: into a headset, or into your room. It's the fifth line on the home page now. Make it. Scrub it. Play it. Bend it. XR it.

One week, four runtime releases

I built it in the open over the first week of November. It went like this.

• 1 November · VR. Any 3D piece can carry an Enter VR button. The runtime brings the controllers, your hands, and a world built in metres with the floor where yours is.
• 2 November · The first try. The first piece I opened on my Quest had no button at all, because I'd made it before VR existed. I asked Perlin to make it VR, and it did. Nothing you've made gets left behind: any 3D piece is one sentence away.
• 2 November · A home for it. A VR & AR page, and three VR pieces in the gallery: Orb Range, Light Brush and Night Orrery.
• 3 November · AR. Pieces learned to find your floor, walls and tables, pin themselves to them and hide behind your real furniture. Then I tried it on my Android phone and got "AR didn't start". One missing permission later, Wall Window was opening an arch onto a snowy valley through my phone's camera.
• 3 November · XR it. The home page got its fifth line, with Leviathan, a jellyfish the size of a house, made to show what VR can do. On a headset, the home page opens on it.
• 4 November · Bring here. AR pieces kept turning up in awkward places, above your head or behind you. Now a button on your phone, a held thumbstick or a headset recentre brings the piece to you.

The runtime under every piece went from version 29 to 32 that week, and every piece got each release the moment it shipped, old ones included.

In a headset

VR pieces are built at your size, in metres, with the floor where yours is. Trigger, grip, the sticks, the A and B buttons and a pinch are all there to use: name the action and Perlin puts it on the right one. Stand still and play, walk with the left stick, or ride something. Turns go in steps, so nobody feels queasy.

The table tennis game is live below. On a laptop it plays right here. On a Quest, open it in the headset's browser and press Enter VR.

In your room

AR is where it gets strange, in a good way. Say "make this in AR" and the piece comes into your room. On a Quest it finds your floor, walls and tables, pins itself to them, and your real sofa can hide it. On an Android phone it's drawn over the camera, on the table in front of you.

If a piece ends up somewhere silly, press Bring here on your phone, hold a thumbstick, or recentre your headset, and it comes to you.

Crossy Grave, the zombie crossing game from the clip above, is live below too. Hop across it here, or open it on a Quest or an Android phone and press Enter AR to put it on your table.

You're already making them

The part I love most is that it didn't stay mine for long. Within days, people were publishing their own:

• Brick Studio by Jack, VR and AR: build with toy bricks, on your table or in VR.
• Night Wall Spray Lab by Create, VR and AR: a neon wall at night, yours to spray.
• Safe Moves by Kris - David, VR and AR: a strategy game on a board in front of you.

And a couple of mine to try: Eye SIght, eyeballs that watch you back, and Tunnel Protocol, a retro corridor shooter. Eleven published pieces in the community run in VR or AR so far.

All of them, and more, are on the VR & AR page.

Make your own

Open any 3D piece of yours in the studio and ask Perlin:

• "make this into VR", for a headset
• "make this in AR", for your room
• "make this in AR and VR", for both

Starting fresh? Any of these in an idea does it: VR, for my Quest, something I can step inside, AR, mixed reality, in my room, on my table, on my wall. Say how big it is, where it goes and what your hands do. A few to start from:

VR runs on a Meta Quest, in its browser. AR runs on a Quest and on Android phones in Chrome. iPhones and iPads don't do AR yet, and on any screen an XR piece still plays exactly as it always did. The VR guide and the AR guide have the details.

How it works, briefly

Every piece on VYBE.ART is a small program, so VR and AR are features of the runtime, not of each piece. A piece says it's ready with one line, and the runtime does the rest: the Enter VR and Enter AR buttons, controllers and hands, your room's surfaces, anchors that keep things pinned, hiding behind real objects, and bringing a piece to you. Perlin knows the rules, and every piece is checked against them before it runs.

I didn't want to strap on a headset for every change, so my coding agents test XR the way they test everything else: headless. They load each piece into Meta's Quest 3 emulator in a simulated living room, press Enter VR, move the head and hands frame by frame, pull triggers and check what happened. The clips in this post came off that same rig. Then I put on the real Quest.

Every 3D piece you've made is one sentence from your living room. Open the studio, pick one, and ask for VR. Then publish it, so I can step inside it too.

The VR and AR clips in this post are real pieces running on VYBE's runtime, filmed in Meta's Quest 3 emulator in a simulated room.

Your turn / Free to start

Describe it. Perlin builds it.

Art, games and worlds you can step inside, from one sentence. Play it, bend it, put it on a timeline, share it.

Create