Thomas Van Bouwel From Cubism To Laser Dance

Thomas Van Bouwel is the solo developer behind Cubism and Laser Dance.

I recommend each of his projects as some of the best of VR. Laser Dance is pure wish fulfillment in mixed reality, resizing itself to your physical environment and deploying a laser maze built to your dimensions. The project is still in early access while Cubism, first launched in 2020, is a kind of spatial toy that can sit inside your environment while you keep an eye on a movie in a flat window. Both apps are supremely comfortable as there’s no artificial locomotion and each supports both hand tracking and controllers, showing Van Bouwel’s application of formal training as an architect to the thoughtful development of games in VR, thinking carefully about how people will experience his use of space.

"There was some conference where somebody was demoing the DK1 and it was a roller coaster and I was very sick after I got the demo and had to like lay down for two hours,” Van Bouwel remembers during the discussion. “But I was very impressed and very fascinated by the technology.”

He quit his job as an architect in 2016 and began attending game jams “full time to learn XR development.”

“Cubism kind of got started like that,” he said. “It wasn’t made in the game jam, but it was just a prototype that I wanted to build at one point. And so I did a very quick prototype over a weekend.”

Our roughly 45-minute conversation is published first to paid subscribers of Good VR with insights in the recording about supporting oneself as a solo developer. The podcast will be made public next week.

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