Playing Doom on a volumetric display is the coolest thing you’ll see today

Here at XDA, we’ve seen Doom running on a ton of hardware. We saw Doom running in Stable Diffusion, Doom running on a Raspberry Pi RP2350 by the chip’s creator, and even Doom running on a lawnmower. Now, it’s time to add another device to the list of “stuff that has run Doom,” except this one goes a little further than most displays.

Someone got Doom running on a volumetric display, and it looks extremely cool

As spotted by The Verge, this amazing project comes to us via James Brown on Mastodon. James achieved this effect by having a 2D panel spin really, really fast, creating the illusion of dots “hanging” in mid-air. He has a massive Mastodon thread explaining and showing off his volumetric display, and it’s well worth your time if you want to learn more about how this tech works.

The display doesn’t show the game in first person – instead, it uses a third-person view of Doom Guy walking through hellish corridors and shooting demons. The third-person perspective really gives the look and feel of a teeny-tiny super soldier running around a 3D space and fighting off the forces of evil. I’d love to see how it’d play in first-person mode, albeit I’m not sure how the volumetric display will handle the perspective. It’s likely that it looks terrible, hence why James went with the third-person view in their demos.

If you want to see more cool ways to play retro games, how about that one time someone made a handheld console with a car reverse camera monitor? Or, if you like your displays to be a little bigger, there’s always the 65-inch magic mirror powered by a Raspberry Pi which puts retro games on the big screen.