If our wishes come true, Valve will one day bring Portal to VR headsets. But what might the beloved puzzle series look like if it was brought into the real world with mixed reality?
That’s a question developer Kenny W set out to answer with this incredible fan-made project that combines the crazy world of Aperture Science with our own. As a simple side project, the developer has brought a fully functioning Portal gun onto Microsoft’s HoloLens, and it’s able to shoot its iconic orange and blue reality-defying doors onto different surfaces in the real world.
While you obviously can’t step through them to teleport yourself (it’s running on HoloLens, not magic), the app does feature the lovable companion cube, which can be placed in one portal and then fall out of the other.
As you can see in the trailer above, this brings a lot of the mind-bending rules of Valve’s videogame into the real world. At one point the user has the cube continuously falling through two portals before switching one of them to fire it across the room. HoloLens is able to recognize objects within your space, thus the cube bounces off of walls and lands on surfaces like tables. It even realistically rolls down a set of stairs.
It’s not a full game as such, and the portals don’t visually reflect the place they lead to like in the real game, though that’s impossible with the current HoloLens hardware. At one point the player does topple a gun turret that could have otherwise shot at him, proving that there’s definitely challenge to be had here, but you’re not likely to see this evolve into a full MR game without Valve’s official approval, especially while HoloLens itself remains a developer kit and not a full consumer product.
Still, Valve has approved of fan-made VR minigames set in its universe, so there’s always hope.
We do know that Valve is making its own VR videogames and, if we’re lucky, it just might be a new entry in the Portal series. If it’s anything as cool as this, it could be one of the best VR apps yet.
