Unleashing Creativity: The Dawn of Microvoxel Gaming with Atomontage

In a world where the distinction between the virtual world and the reality around us is rapidly disappearing, Atomontage is shaking up the gaming world with a game-changing new technology. Ever since its first playable test was recently launched with real-time avatars and a ton of different modes, the Virtual Matter game development platform is set on course to change the future of gaming and create new possibilities for interactive creative experiences on our phone and beyond. This piece explores the core of this new technology to unpack how Atomontage’s microvoxel tech is transforming game experiences and creative expression in the process.

The Genesis of Virtual Matter

For the first time, Atomontage, a deep tech startup with its origins at Columbia University, has released a playable test for its Virtual Matter game development platform that is available for free via the Atomontage Client app on all iOS, ANDROID and web browsers. By combining streaming, microvoxel technology, and shader optimization, this technology is opening up new avenues for creativity in game design and providing revolutionary new ways to play on a range of devices from desktops, smartphones and console to VR and mixed reality systems.

BRIDGING REALITIES: Phone to Phenomenon

The key to Virtual Matter is that it makes it effortless to create a connection between the digital and physical worlds. Just take a photo with your phone, upload it, and you have a destroyable game asset you can work with, or import one from another source. The technology has partnerships with the Common Sense Machines Cube 3D generative AI platform, where any image you snap with your phone becomes something you can manipulate in the virtual world.

Crafting and Creation in the Palm of Your Hand

The Atomontage platform adds an additional layer of interaction by allowing users to test their Virtual Matter creations in a first-person view game test. Such creations can be used either to build avant-garde constructs, to carve out elaborate architecture or spaces, or to design avatars, personalise player bases, or stylise vehicles à la Mad Max.

A New Dimension for Cortex Command

In the meantime, Atomontage has announced a collaboration with the tiny indie studio Data Realms to put the 3D tech to work on Cortex Command, an old 2D indie game ‘on the brink of greatness’. The prototype is due out in summer 2024.

Voxels: The Building Blocks of Tomorrow

Central to Atomontage’s innovation is the use of voxels, or ‘volume pixels’, where players can alter the world at an incredibly high level of interaction, and with a level of creativity at an as-yet unseen fine granularity, without becoming hobbyists for the hardware. This is a new kind of digital crafting of a dynamically modifiable world that, in games such as Minecraft and Teardown, encourages and cultivates emergent gameplay.

A Glimpse into the Future of Game Development

The company’s game development environment – which will include a full Lua scripting environment, audio streaming and more – will be publicly available in the next few months. It’s an evolution that could make Atomontage a fully integrated development and distribution environment, with as much simulation detail as Minecraft but with much higher fidelity 3D graphics, built on two decades of rigorous research and development.

Understanding Atomontage's Microvoxel Marvel

Atomontage’s technology itself is the end product of nearly 24 years of scholarship and development, which has developed several patent-pending features. The result is a fundamentally new technology that allows for content to flow seamlessly from 3D capture and creation to interactive graphics on screens and beyond. In the simplest conception, volumetric content is created for every small 3D cube at the base of the microvoxels and then later recombined into larger volumes. Atomontage started with a simple minimal viable product for some minimal visualisation in 2021, but that could eventually grow into a platform that streamlines every step of 3D computer simulation and graphics for commercial gaming and beyond.

In a time when the next frontier in games and digital creativity is being invented, and where the promise of Atomontage’s Virtual Matter technology, realised through mobile devices such as the phone, represents a significant milestone in delivering an enriched realm of acuities, the pathway is crystal clear – we are rapidly moving towards a world where the very synthetic nature of the digital realm will be interwoven with our physical lives in ways that have never been imagined, ushering us into a new age of interactive digital creativity.