MN VR and HCI Sept 2026: Jetpack Clankers
New XR Hardware – Zach Wendt
The annual Meta Connect conference starts hours before our Sept meeting, so we’ll have first-hand details from RJ White and Matt Foreman in Oct. I’ll just do a quick overview of the new Meta XR announcements and headset, and new headsets from Valve, Pico and others that will be announced before Connect.
Jetpack Clankers: Racing, Robots, and Reckless Locomotion – Paul Christian
Jetpack Clankers started as a jetpack locomotion add-on inside Wooorld. It was fun enough that we eventually asked: what if we built a whole game around it?
This talk traces that evolution, from early experiments inside Wooorld to a standalone free social VR world built for racing, Clankball, combat, basketball, music, toys, and general chaos. I’ll get into some of the technical and design decisions along the way, including how we represent the player avatar in a way that gracefully reflects the actual physical interface between human input and the game environment, rather than trying to infer a full body that the system cannot really observe. I’ll also cover building a kilometer-wide environment that can still run on Quest, custom shaders and procedural audio synthesis, multiplayer physics with Normcore, avatar motion recording and playback, and our emerging “Clankbrain” companion bots.
I’ll also talk about deliberately embracing fast, extreme VR locomotion in a medium that often tries to avoid it. Top speeds in Jetpack Clankers reach around 500 km/h, and rather than smoothing that away, we built around the sensation of speed and the audience that actually wants that kind of experience.
Schedule:
- 6:30 Social and setup
- 7:00 Kickoff / announcements
- 7:15 Zach
- 7:30 Paul
- ~8:45 Tear-down, cross the sidewalk to Yardhouse
Attending and Parking:
This event will be in person at the REM5 STUDIOS new office in West End and the presentation will be streamed live at https://www.youtube.com/igdatc
Park underground and take the central red elevator to ground level, then cross the sidewalk. REM5 STUDIOS is across from Yardhouse. Map below.
About MN VR and HCI:
MN VR and HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) welcomes developers, tinkerers and enthusiasts working with all variety of VR, AR, HCI, hardware hacking, creative coding and interactive art. Members are working on projects with custom displays and lenses, projection mapping, mocap, tiny computers, servos and sensors, interactive art and a wide variety of VR, AR, motion and computer vision applications. If you’ve only been to our parent group IGDATC meetings, MN VR and HCI is a slightly different format: We aim for smaller group discussions and lots of specific details.
