This page mirrors my original Substack post inside the John’s World section of EricRhea.com. The original remains available at advisoryhour.substack.com.
Following my virtualworld explorations and undoubtedly you’re familiar with John’s World. John’s World is like so many projects in life. It starts out as one thing, then becomes something else. Projects are funny that way. You build an anime virtual world engine one weekend and then next thing you know you have a hyper-realistic recreation of the 1920s.
What I realized is the unique system harness I built for handling change-of-perspective plausibly solves real interactions that makes longer videos interesting to watch. This was really cemented in the work around JW1986. The video footage starts wide, then gradually we peel in closer, and closer until the main character driving the car is looking directly at you.
While 1986 is a fun world to explore there’s that itch I had today of different is good. And from that was born a remarkable idea: what if I tried having a character that’s an actress on a movie set? Maybe she’s a silent film actress.
I considered a war set, but the censors are strong on that content. Plus, the sensibilities are hard to get right. Instead, I am more interested in coherence of having a character manipulate the world and tracking state over time. That’s the real interesting gem inside this harness. It’s not a simple video creation tool. It’s a world simulation engine that tracks state changes over the longer haul. For example, I’ve made several improvements to figure out how fender damage in a car might occur in one scene and then carry forward.
There’s an entire new world to explore. JW1925 will be back.
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