Here's what playing Minecraft inside Minecraft looks like
OBSidian.
We've all taken on some strange and wacky pet projects during lockdown, but YouTuber Fundy appears to have taken this to new extremes, as he's created a video showing himself playing Minecraft inside Minecraft. You can practically hear the Inception music blaring.
As demonstrated in a video on Fundy's YouTube channel, he was able to play Minecraft within Minecraft in real time, along with playing Pictionary and surfing the web. In one particularly trippy moment, Fundy used his webcam to broadcast a live image of himself in Minecraft blocks. In essence, he was able to stream his computer monitor into Minecraft, rendered via thousands of blocks.
So, how was this technological marvel achieved? Fundy says he ran a separate server coded in Node, which allowed him to record his entire monitor and convert all the pixels into RGB colours. The program then compared these to the closest colour available in Minecraft blocks, then sent the data to Minecraft via a WebSocket. Then, finally, a couple of servers in Minecraft would deconstruct the code and make sure it corresponded to the appropriate blocks.
This process certainly wasn't entirely perfect - the amount of blocks meant some details were missed, while it also struggled to achieve the colour of human skin. Fundy also isn't the first to play Minecraft within Minecraft, as YouTuber Bandi demonstrated a similar mod last year (albeit with no information on the mod itself). Still, it's an entertaining watch - and I can certainly empathise with the program's struggle to recreate human skin. I learnt that the hard way in art class.