I grabbed my Super Mario 64 cartridge off the shelf, backed up the game to my Mac and stuck the file in a folder on Meta Quest 3. Then I opened the APK sent to me by Lucas Martinic of studio Present Futures.
Voila. Mario was controllable by the analog stick on my right controller and, with my left hand, I could reach into the virtual world I first visited around 30 years ago. Mario could stand on my hand, I could lift him up by raising my arm, and I could even pinch him by the hat and pull him forward into the physical room with me. Essentially, the Master Hand from Super Smash Bros was now reality. There Mario was, for the first time in my life, standing there on my dining room table. I pushed the stick to the right and he fell off the edge of the table and started running around on my floor.
I put Mario back inside his virtual world and then used the stick to send him into the castle. That’s where the magic ended. I found the limit of Martinic’s work to bridge Super Mario 64 to physical reality. To understand how this remarkable interaction came to be, I invited Martinic on the Good VR Podcast.
“That’s the idea, to just inspire other developers and maybe non-XR developers to jump into XR,” Martinic said.
During the recording he shared that he worked with an AI agent to make Mario’s transition across mixed reality possible. He said he spends around $600 per month total for three Claude Max plans as part of his ongoing exploratory work with VR headsets. Another project Martinic is working on called Inkphony won $100,000 from a Meta hackathon. The app uses the Logitech MX Ink stylus to draw musical notes directly onto a physical surface and the app promises the ability to pluck sounds from objects in the environment.
“We are still…redesigning some stuff because the premise, or the vision, that we presented for that hackathon is not feasible to do,” Martinic explained during the podcast. “It’s possible, but it’s not sustainable. Because the way we set up the vision AI models that we use to manage to do this will surpass what people pay for the app.”
The podcast with Martinic is around 18 minutes long and covers the odd economies of eye-catching AI-driven development.
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