Digital Arts, Digital Games and Volumetry: State-of-the-Art and Current Scenario

This paper examines the convergence of digital arts, digital games, and volumetric technologies, arguing that volumetric video and volumetry, interactive three-dimensional visualization techniques rooted in mid-twentieth-century computing and photogrammetry, can broaden the creative and social reach of digital games. Grounding its argument in Huizinga's account of play as foundational to culture, the work contends that game dynamics now pervade social, political, economic, and military life, and that digital art and games share interactivity, immersion, and contextual reception. Its central claim is that these overlapping fields will continue to reshape how people engage with media, their environments, and one another.

The paper surveys the current state of volumetric video and virtual reality in games and game art. Volumetric video offers six degrees of freedom and deeper immersion than conventional two-dimensional or 360-degree video, yet the authors note that research remains exploratory and inconsistent in terminology. Illustrative cases include the V-SENSE "MR play" trilogy, the MUDA exhibition, and VR titles such as Half-Life: Alyx. Significant barriers persist, most notably the heavy data demands of volumetric media, which can reach roughly 5 Gbps for point cloud video, and the technology's continued position outside the mainstream.

Historically, the study traces the lineage of digital art and games from early computer works such as Spacewar! (1962) to Brazilian telematic and net art of the 1990s, including NETLUNG, Moone, Econ, and Movemaker. Its discussion covers the post-mid-2010s emergence of VR games and concludes that games function as a means of fostering digital literacy and public engagement with digital art forms. The final section emphasizes the poetic and narrative dimensions shared by games and art, which allow participants to shape their experiences, and it presents volumetric video as a technology that turns viewers into active participants across games, concerts, and films.