A display you can walk around
The precedent. Maker James Brown began experimenting with rotary volumetric displays in October 2023. His first build was a cylinder. By February 2024 he had a second one inside a 400 mm acrylic globe, and by September 2024 it was running a playable port of Doom.
How it works. A pair of 128 × 64 RGB LED panels stands vertically on a spinning platform. A Raspberry Pi 4 rides with them and redraws the panels as they turn, so each angle shows a different slice of a 3D scene and the eye joins the slices into a solid image. An infrared photo-interrupter marks zero on every turn, and 12 V power comes up through a slip ring made from car alternator parts.
Why it matters here. It shows the core idea of both concepts working with off-the-shelf parts: a game as a volume of light inside a clear enclosure, readable from every side. Brown’s starting point was that Doom’s monsters are flat sprites, so he drew them from voxel models instead.
What a product would have to solve. A spinning rotor needs balancing, guarding and quiet bearings. Resolution is set by LED pitch. And the lit volume is a cylinder, so it has to fit inside the prism or the cube with glass to spare.
Solid State Volumetric 3D Display
James Brown’s newest build drops the spinning parts. The image sits as points of coloured light inside a clear block on a small base, and it reads from every side. It is the closest precedent for these concepts: a volume of light inside glass, with nothing moving. His build video shows it running from many angles.
Watch the build video ↗
James Brown’s post, 2 December 2025 ↗
Play on YouTube ↗
Vortex: the spinning display, assembled
Vortex is the name of James Brown’s rotary display: spinning LED panels inside an acrylic sphere that draw a moving 3D image by persistence of vision. The Awesomer covered the assembly video in December 2024.
Watch the Vortex assembly ↗
The Awesomer · Making Vortex, 13 December 2024 ↗
GitHub · AncientJames: VortexParts, the printable parts for the Vortex display ↗
Play on YouTube ↗
Voxon VX1: the same idea as a product
Voxon Photonics built a desktop volumetric display, the VX1, and in 2017 published a short tutorial on taking a Blender animation onto it. The last part of the video shows the animation running as a solid image under the dome. The company’s current VX2 is listed with a 25 cm × 25 cm volume at 30 volumes per second, using swept-volume LED technology, at 6,800 USD.
Watch the demo from 2:00 ↗
voxel3d.co · company and current displays ↗
Play on YouTube from 2:00 ↗
Doom on a volumetric display
In September 2024 James Brown’s globe ran a playable Doom. He kept the game logic from the Doom Generic port and replaced the part that draws the 3D scene. Monsters are voxel models from the Voxel Doom mod, the rooms are drawn minimally, the view zooms in on each fight, and the flat menus and status panels are wrapped onto a cylinder.
The rotor tops out at about 700 RPM; beyond that, vibration and chassis flex take over. That is the engineering limit a product version would have to beat. The PRISM reel stages its corridor level in a similar way, as a model seen from outside rather than a first-person view.
