If there’s one thing that could make the Quest 3 big, Super Mario in mixed reality might be a pretty good bet.
On that front, believe it or not, we have some progress. Redditor u/llbsidezll showed off a demo that transposes the iconic world of Super Mario 64 into his room. It’s wild to think that one person could produce such a smooth demo but take a look for yourself below.
With the Quest 3 having come out earlier this month, we’ve been seeing people get very creative with the headset and its proper passthrough. People are using it to learn piano and run virtual screens while they do chores, but u/llbsidezll’s short Mario 64 demo really hits home.
Mixed Reality MARIO
Speaking to Inverse, u/llbsidezll explained the technical process, which uses Virtual Desktop’s passthrough feature and Blender’s built-in VR support. Virtual Desktop lets you make the background invisible, much like a green screen in visual effects while Blender lets you drop in Super Mario 64 models thanks to an add-on created by the modding community. Combined, we see a Mario model pulled from the game code interacting with all the things that u/llbsidezll manually mapped out in his room. This whole process isn’t as simple as other Quest 3 passthrough uses, but the end result is pretty compelling.
If you really want to see how the sausage is made, u/llbsidezll detailed his process in another Reddit post. The redditor said that you can make the Mario model interact with anything you create, but dropped in objects from the original game to keep the aesthetic for his demo.
“In theory, you could make a really tiny version with the entire level on your desk or go full scale and make a massive version that works outside or in a large warehouse,” u/llbsidezll told Inverse.
THE BALL IS IN NINTENDO’S COURT
u/llbsidezll told Inverse that this was just a “fun proof of concept” and has no plans of putting out an actual project like this, especially considering how protective Nintendo is with its IP. The silver lining is that there’s a lot of interest in a mixed reality platform game as evidenced the response that his video has attracted.
Even if it isn’t Mario-related, an interactive mixed-reality platformer that can work in any environment sounds like exactly the type of thing the Quest 3 is built for.
It’s hard to say whether we can expect a full-fledged Mario platformer in mixed reality any time soon, but the interest is clearly there. The fact that this demo was made by a savvy Redditor with some 3D modeling know-how means Nintendo could definitely pull it off.
