Beeple Design Competition

Beeple (also known as Mike Winkelmann) is a visual artist who creates at least one new work every single day. He’s been doing this daily for the last ten years, and inspired countless others to do the same. King Deluxe decided that, in honour of this ten year anniversary, they wanted to bring his creations to life in virtual reality.

They invited designers to interpret Beeple’s illustrations and videos to create scenes using Unity. Those scenes were then uploaded to the social network VRChat. The top submissions were showcased in London as part of Digital Decade V: Cyberia, August 25–27, but for those who didn’t get a chance to attend, Hammer & Tusk decided to check out our favourites.

Here they are, in no particular order.

Fuxillon Core

This is really fascinating interpretation of one of Beeple’s worlds. Instead of designing the outside of the image, this artist brings you inside what they imagine the core of a machine to look like. The sparse lines and clean atmosphere were really nice, and the screens were easy to read. There was a really fascinating rolling ball that you could follow around, with a really excellent use of shaded colours and motion. I’m not sure if this was the only world where your avatar cast a shadow or just the only one where I noticed it, but that definitely stood out as a neat easter egg!

Milkgoo

This was our favourite in terms of a world we would want to explore, though it felt the more different from the image that inspired it. There was a strange pink man tied to one of the floating structures, which we can’t seem to find in the original picture (though maybe it’s just well hidden?). We also appeared standing more than knee-deep in the ground, which may have been a flaw with our Oculus rather than the room, although it didn’t happen in any of the other worlds. Still, we could easily imagine this as the setting of a VR game, so it gets high marks for creativity and intricate detail.

Edith

Edith immediately caught our eye because of it’s clean, bright lines. There’s deceptively more to explore here than it first seems — don’t be fooled by your entry point just out the gate! Have a look around and stare into that strangely mesmerizing sky. The ground was a little boring (and waaay too bright) but the rest of the environment made up for it. We would have liked more moving parts, but overall it was a fantastic time.

Go have a look for yourself; there are tons more worlds that we didn’t get a chance to see, and you can view any you’d like by skipping on over to VRChat and exploring the “worlds” tag. We searched for Beeple to find these, but you should be able to see them all directly through the Beeple Hub as well.

Written by Wren Handman for www.hammerandtusk.com.