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4D Toys: a box of four-dimensional toys
- hcs 9y agoI considered linking to the game's site at http://4dtoys.com/ http://4dtoys.com/ , but this blog post introducing it has more design details that I think will interest HN.
- yev 9y agoDamn, it's so cool!
- tyingq 9y agoReminded of this Carl Sagan video that I watched as a kid. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTL02N9EHzU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTL02N9EHzU
- comboy 9y agoThese videos are such a treasure. All these years and nobody came even close (new Cosmos is ok, but not that profound). This is how you make a nation great. You can do whatever you want with the economy, but without proper education you still have a nation of.. people.. who choose their president.. based on their beliefs and understanding of the world.
- tyingq 9y agoShows the relative importance of a great presenter too. The props he uses are laughably cheap, yet he does a better job getting the point across than vastly more expensive productions.
- pmilla1606 9y agoThis looks like fun, going to try this out over the weekend. This is the same person who made this game (that also looks like good fun): http://miegakure.com/ http://miegakure.com/ that I remember reading about some years ago but never got a chance to play with
- sp332 9y agoThe game isn't out yet.
- i_cant_speel 9y agoYes it is.
- marctenbosch 9y agoAh, miegakure is not out yet, sorry!
- KeyboardFire 9y agoIt's a shame it's only for iOS and Vive. I wonder how difficult it would be to make an open source desktop/browser version? Even if it's a lot simpler, it would be neat to feel what it'd be like to play around in 4 dimensions.
- olejorgenb 9y agoAnother user posted this (simpler) java 4d maze: http://www.urticator.net/maze/index.html http://www.urticator.net/maze/index.html
- hcs 9y ago4D Toys is now available for non-VR PC, I just noticed this tweet from the author: https://twitter.com/marctenbosch/status/871073480573202432 https://twitter.com/marctenbosch/status/871073480573202432
- gmuslera 9y agoNow is a good moment to reread Lewis Padgett's Mimsy were the Borogoves, specially if your children start playing with those toys.
- Jare 9y agoOr they ask WTH was that scene about in Inside/Out. :)
- fractallyte 9y agoOn a happier note, also don't forget 'Star Bright', by Mark Clifton (1952), online here: http://www.astraeasweb.net/politics/starbright.html http://www.astraeasweb.net/politics/starbright.html
- jerf 9y agohttp://jabberwockland.blogspot.com/2007/03/mimsy-were-borogoves-by-lewis-padgett.html http://jabberwockland.blogspot.com/2007/03/mimsy-were-borogo... My favorite short story of that era. Still have not watched the movie out of sheer fear they didn't get it and I don't want it wrecked. (Still have no idea how that even made it out...)
- gyrgtyn 9y agoMight be useful for figuring out how to battle cthulu
- mihaifm 9y agoThe video explaining it is really well made, but for some reason I still can't grasp the 4th dimension. Perhaps it's one of those things that you only need to know they exist at the theoretical level.
- eriknstr 9y agoSame here. I understand perfectly everything that was said in the video but I still don't understand how the fourth dimension quite works. However, having only heard of hypercubes and not hyperspheres before I decided to see if there was anything useful about them online and I found this video that I just started watching and already 1 min 50 sec into the video something very interesting was said; > Everybody knows what the sphere is. I'm thinking of a hollow sphere so like a basketball right. That's a two-dimensional surface living in a three-dimensional space. The hypersphere is generalized one dimension up, so in four dimensions you have this three-dimensional space called the 3-sphere or the hypersphere. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krmV1hDybuU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krmV1hDybuU Already this is telling me something that I have not heard before, and which I find much more helpful than talking about what a shape looks like from the perspective of someone living one dimension further down. That being said it was still useful having that explained as well, which is what Flatland: The Movie (2007) was about as well. Just this fact I quoted above was even more useful IMO.
- eriknstr 9y agoAnother quote from the video I linked in parent comment. 6:19 > As complex numbers are to real numbers, quaternions are to complex numbers. It's like a way to build up even further. [...] Real numbers are one-dimensional. Complex numbers are two-dimensional. [...] For three dimensions there is no natural number system, but for four dimensions there is and it looks like this.
- eriknstr 9y agoThe rest of the video up until 16:26 has been about projecting down one dimension but it's doing so in different ways instead of just simple cross-section and it's using videos to show rotations and stuff.
- throwaway135634 9y agoI'm surprised that Flatland[0] wasn't mentioned in this [0]http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/201 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/201
- js8 9y agoThey actually do mention Flatland at 4dtoys.com.
- zitterbewegung 9y agoAs a person who studied knot theory and sitting through other peoples presentations about higher dimensional knots this looks like a neat treat! After hearing about the concept I bought the game and tried it out. I like how you replace actual physical actions to objects in 4 dimentions. Usually this is projected on the time axis but with this interface it makes it much more fun to play with it instead of having basically a generic slider.
- thaumasiotes 9y agoHigher dimensional knots? I thought one of the first things you learned in knot theory was that knots are only possible in three dimensions?
- zitterbewegung 9y agoYea so you consider a two dimentional sphere embedded in a four dimentional ball. So it's a S^2 that is knotted in R^4.
- rjeli 9y agoLove the idea! Unfortunately it's not compatible with iOS plus-sized screens :(
- Twisol 9y agoI'm hitting the same problem -- the app only renders to a smaller rectangle of the whole screen rooted at the bottom-left (when held sideways), but touch events are scaled to the whole screen. I could probably live with the smaller view, but it's very hard to accurately manipulate the objects when it thinks I'm touching further left than I actually am.
- octalmage 9y agoSame issue here. Has anyone reached out to the developer?
- marctenbosch 9y agoI am aware of the issue and fixing right now!
- wruza 9y agoThis app is very cool. Do you have a plan to add projection mode in addition to crosssection?
- marctenbosch 9y agoSomething like that, yes.
- rjeli 9y agoGreat, thanks a ton
- yathern 9y agoThis looks fantastic. If I had a VR device I would get this immediately. I've always had a fascination with trying to grok higher dimensions. I think it's just about impossible to have an intuitive understanding of it - 3D spacial reasoning is in our wiring through both nature and experience. You know the theory of how language shapes your thinking? For example, in societies where there is no separate word for orange and red, they have extreme trouble telling the difference between them. In some native tribe where they use cardinal directions (North, South) - not relative (Left, Right) - they have an almost supernatural ability to know which direction they are without needing any other cues (sunlight, stars). Point being - would being able to completely think in four dimensions have an impact on how you understand the world?
- malnourish 9y agoI thought the majority of sapir-whorf thought had been disproven and at best only a mild amount had support? At least, that's what I remember learning in my linguistics courses in college. I'm willing to be wrong.
- throwaway91111 9y agoYou have to look at how it was initially positioned. Linguistic determinism as a general purpose tool has not proved to be useful, but it doesn't mean that there isn't clear linguistic determinism in certain areas. Colors may be the easiest way to see some limited sapir-whorf in action.
- yathern 9y agoYou're probably right - I actually suspected that may be the case - though I was only using that as a parallelism for what I'm saying. Language, in my understanding, operates at a lower level of abstraction in the brain than say, Math. I would suspect that Spacial Reasoning is similarly low-level. It would be interesting to see if there is any impact to the higher-level reasoning when the foundational blocks are played with. The difference probably wouldn't be very large, I'm now realizing. People who are blind since birth, as far as I know, don't have any observable differences in common patterns of thought. And that seems like a larger difference in low-level thought than being able to understand four dimensions versus three. (Not suggesting blind people lack spacial reasoning in three dimensions)
- chmod775 9y agoI'm curious how this would look if the 4D space was projected onto the 3D space instead of taking a cross-section, much like we already project 3D space onto 2D space (your display), to create "3d" graphics.
- Rotten194 9y agoIsn't that what the traditional 3d visualization of a hypercube is? e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercube#/media/File%3AHypercube.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercube#/media/File%3AHype...
- chmod775 9y agoYes. I'd love to play around with that in a sandbox.
- BearGoesChirp 9y agoIsn't that a 2d projection of the 3d projection of 4d space? It gets weird because our eyes see almost in 2d, and even with VR, there is a 2d feed to each eye that gets combined to add slight 3d depth perception. So really we would be projecting a 4d world onto two 2d plains that our visual cortex would try to merge to add slight depth perception.
- jobigoud 9y agoThere are existing projects for this, for example [1]. I haven't tried OP demo yet (but I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about 4D and VR and implemented my own viewers), and I'm very convinced that the cross section approach is much much better if you want to deeply understand what is happening. The perspective projection folds the fourth dimension into our hyperplane and you can't untangle it. To paste something I wrote here [2], regarding the difficulty of groking the tesseract from the projected figure, I think it’s almost impossible to realize that there are points inside the tesseract that are not inside any of the eight cubes visible in the [projected] image, or that if you trace a diagonal between the corners of the tesseract you do not pass through any of the eight cubes. There is much more space inside the hypercube than meets the eye in the perspective projection. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFmDLUUhZjE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFmDLUUhZjE [2]: http://1å.fr/blog/down-the-4d-rabbit-hole-navigation/ http://xn--1-2fa.fr/blog/down-the-4d-rabbit-hole-navigation/
- microcolonel 9y agoWhy a box and not a hyperbox?
- js8 9y agoIf you make a Kickstarter to 4D print them, I would support it for my kids. I think for kids, it's more important to play with real-world physical objects rather than their virtual computer representation.
- hcs 9y agoIf you 4D print a tesseract, I would suspect you of witchcraft.
- placeybordeaux 9y agoIs this satire?
- js8 9y agoIt's a joke - I don't actually have kids. And I mean the 2nd sentence seriously. Also, quick googling reveals that 4D printers haven't been invented yet, so presumably one would need a KS for those first.
- tomdre 9y agoAs we represent on a 2d paper a projection of a 3d cube, we can print a 3d object that represents a projection of a 4d one. I'm down for the kickstarter.
- jacobolus 9y agoYou might like http://www.3dprintmath.com/chapters/3-Four-dimensional-space http://www.3dprintmath.com/chapters/3-Four-dimensional-space
- gene-h 9y agoGeorge Hart made STL files for 3d projections of a number of 4d objects[0]. Some 3d printers include them as example prints One place I know even used Hart's 3d projection of 120 cell as a standard test print. It has a bunch of thin complicated features that machines have trouble with. One could tell immediately if something was wrong with the machine if the thin pieces were deformed or came out too brittle that normal handling broke them. [0]http://www.georgehart.com/rp/rp.html http://www.georgehart.com/rp/rp.html [1]http://www.georgehart.com/rp/120-cell-george-hart.stl http://www.georgehart.com/rp/120-cell-george-hart.stl
- prbuckley 9y agoThis is very cool. It reminds me of the classic geometry novel Flatland. If you like thinking about dimensionality I highly recommend it... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland
- wyager 9y agoThe game this engine is for, Miegakure, is inspired by flatland.
- prbuckley 9y agoThis is very cool. It reminds me of the classic geometry novel Flatland. If you like thinking about dimensionality I highly recommend it... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland
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- wyager 9y agoDoes anyone have any resources on orthographically projecting 4D objects to 3D or 2D spaces? I'm curious if it looks better than taking a cross-section. It seems like it should work similarly; deform a 4-frustum into a 4-cube and drop one or two of the axes. I guess the number of axes you can drop depends on the symmetry of the frustum...
- coldpie 9y agoI tried googling "orthographically projecting 4D objects to 3D" to see if I'd strike gold and, boom: http://eusebeia.dyndns.org/4d/vis/vis http://eusebeia.dyndns.org/4d/vis/vis Edit: In particular, this page shows a good summary of how the "slices" shown in the game relate to the hypercube projection you're familiar with. http://eusebeia.dyndns.org/4d/vis/09-interp-1#Interpreting_4D_Projections_1 http://eusebeia.dyndns.org/4d/vis/09-interp-1#Interpreting_4...
- Qantourisc 9y agoWhat annoys me most: "thing disappear" I don't recall 3D -> 2D mapping making things disappear, just surfaces hiding other surfaces. But this might not work in 4D? With the 2D->3D they are taking cross-section, I really don't like these. Just throw it all on there ! This would also mean you project your 4D world on a 3D camera, you project on a 2D surface to display. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVo2igbFSPE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVo2igbFSPE <= this method is "saner" imo.
- yathern 9y agoI think the difference is projection versus cross-section. A video game is a 3D world projected on a 2D screen. The game is not a cross-section of the 3D world. In this game, you play within a cross-section of the fourth dimension, which you can move along a slider, sort of like a CT scan. That having been said, I don't have any clue what a 4D projection into 3D space would look like. I suspect we would have much more difficulty understanding it.
- Qantourisc 9y agoWell look at the video for projection. But you raise an interesting point, perhaps we could encode the 4the dimension in color or the stereoscopic channel (with VR gear) and remove this channel from the 3D part as we can do 3D without stereo.
- sp332 9y agoThat's if you do a "projection", like light rays from a 3D object focused onto a screen. This is more like taking a 3D slice of a 4D object. If you think of taking a 2D slice of a 3D object, you can see how objects disappear when they move out of the plane that you're drawing.
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoIf you sliced a tesseract then presumably you'd encase it in the knife and a square, with no depth (the depth is in the 4th dimension that we're not experiencing), would appear? Hypercubes have always been a difficult one for me to intuit, basically I have no 4th dimensional intuition. When I think of a 4D hypersphere all I can get is a simple sphere. I don't have any intuition as to whether that's wrong, it seems in a way it should be a sphere with infinite spheres on it's surface - from analogy with the tesseract - but from analogy of constructing a sphere from a circle it should be a case of rotating the sphere around itself perpendicular to the extra dimension?
- aboodman 9y agoI can't get this to run on iOS. Is it supposed to work? It just sits at the splash page playing a slightly interactive animation over and over. There's an arrow that I tried tapping and dragging and nothing happens.
- thsowers 9y agoSame thing happened to me, I think I fixed by swiping left
- aboodman 9y agoI'm seriously swiping as hard as I can in every direction.
- marctenbosch 9y agoAre you on an iPhone 6+ or 7+? If so, a new build is being reviewed by Apple.
- aboodman 9y agoYep. For a minute there I was worried this was some Myst-like intelligence test that I was failing. Looking forward to the be build.
- drewrv 9y agoOne of the first things I thought of when I got a vive is building an app to let one intuitively navigate and understand four dimensional space. I never had the time or talent to hack something together though so I'm glad this exists. Something similar but less polished can be found here: http://www.albert-hwang.com/blog/2016/6/what-does-vr-reveal-about-the-4th-dimension http://www.albert-hwang.com/blog/2016/6/what-does-vr-reveal-...
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- dmix 9y agoEasily the hardest part of learning about string theory for me (via reading "The Elegant Universe" [1]) was grasping the idea of multiple other dimensions. The book tried it's best to explain it by exploring a world starting with 1D and evolving to 3D, but it's still quite difficult to visualize, especially ones shaped like a "Calabi–Yau manifold" [2]. The one good thing I got out of learning about Calabi-Yau manifolds (and randomly reading another layman story involving Yau's clash with the guy who solved Poincaré conjecture) was a new interest in learning more about math and a getting a laymans grasp of topology. Although I later learned manifolds are quite an advanced subset of topology. I enjoyed the linked video, I was looking for a way to better understand 4+D in a way I could wrap my head around and an interactive game makes a lot of sense. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Elegant-Universe-Superstrings-Dimensions-Ultimate/dp/039333810X/ https://www.amazon.com/Elegant-Universe-Superstrings-Dimensi... [2] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Calabi%E2%80%93Yau_manifold https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Calabi%E2%80%93Yau_manifold
- moopling 9y agoit would be interesting to see multiple views at the same time, like how when we try to represent 3d shapes in 2d (think mechanical design drawing, archetictural drawings, etc)
- Razengan 9y agoI'm immensely interested in the prospect of higher spatial dimensions. Is it even possible to prove/disprove their existence from our 3D existence, and have there been any notable attempts to do so?
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- Benjamin_Dobell 9y agoOdd. I just bought this on my wife's iPad. It opens, drops some shapes and then repeats. If you touch the screen it instantly crashes
- Benjamin_Dobell 9y agoI'm guessing there's a missing/incorrect OS/functionality check somewhere cause she's on iOS 8.2. Upgrading now and will report back. Also grabbed the crash-logs and will email them through.
- panic 9y agoI'm seeing the same thing. It looks like the app is calling -[UITraitCollection forceTouchCapability], which isn't available on iOS 8.
- marctenbosch 9y agoA new build is being reviewed by Apple!
- panic 9y agoAwesome, thank you for the super fast response!
- amelius 9y agoI wonder if, after playing many hours with this game, the brain will suddenly "grasp" the concept of 4d.
- wruza 9y agoI think it will. I'm aware of two somewhat related experiments: upside-down vision and magnetic field vision. In first experiment, participant wore vertical flipping glasses for a week. He was walking, eating, cycling and so on, never taking glasses off. At the end of experiment he was pretty good at it and it seemed natural. When glasses were finally off, he felt very discomfortable for some time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_adaptation#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_adaptation#History -- one of these experiments. In the second experiment participant wore belt (iirc) that signaled north pole location to his skin. After wearing it for a long time, that feeling turned completely into new sense of magnetic field. You simply know where "north" is, anytime. After taking it off, he responded that it was pretty stressful, like you lose one of your senses or limbs. Experiment group was concerned to that they stopped these experiments. (no link found, but seen on HN) All this shows that our brain is probably not specific to available senses/setting and can "grasp" any concept, if exposed to it for a long time, but both in and out may take a hard time.
- _Microft 9y agoCheck the following links for information on such a belt. It's a spin-off from research on "sensory substitution" at a german university (in Osnabrück). http://www.feelspace.de/navibelt/ http://www.feelspace.de/navibelt/ http://www.feelspace.de/research/ http://www.feelspace.de/research/
- bbcbasic 9y agoHe's going to make some coin from this.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- nautilus12 9y agoThis is so cool, but its driving me crazy. I was wondering if someone could provide me with more resources that help intuit about 4d space. For example, in Miegekure, he walks through the 4th dimension to get to the other side of the wall, but thats assuming that no part of the wall extends into the forth dimension (aside from rubble). What would happen if he switched back to the normal 3 dimensions in the middle of the wall. In miegekure everything is kind of discretized (grassy area to desert area), but in reality that would be continuous. What would that actually look like, for example, the area right next to the wall? How would this work at a subatomic level, would electrons be traveling in and out of the 4th dimension? Could this explain things like action at a distance or black holes? How does the explain shared surfaces in the 4th dimension? I can't even answer a basic question like, if I were sitting in an easy chair and started looking down the 4th dimension what would happen. Since it has to share one cross section of the easy chair would it have to be simply a fatter or skinnier easy chair? But that is true for any cross section of the chair correct? The easy chair is the 3d cross section of the 4d object then what (would/could) the 3d cross section exchanging one of our spatial dimensions for the hidden one look like? How does gravity work in those 3 dimensions (2 of our spatial dimensions + 1 of the hidden dimension). Supposing the world was like this, wouldn't it be obvious if any object was extending into the 4th dimension thus we can stand to reason our world must be strictly 3 dimensional? If there were 4 dimensions since we can't see or interact with it, does it stand to reason that the spatial extent of any object doesn't extend into the 4th dimension? For example, since the three dimensional projection of a hypersphere changes diameter, does that mean the 4d dimensional analogues of earth are just different size earths? I also notice that in one of the miegekure videos the windmill in the new 3d space is like a cross section of the windmill but extending for a distance, Im guessing this is a product of the way the 4th dimension is discretized but Im wondering, what would that really look like if the game weren't made that way?
- jameshart 9y agoI found this Matt Parker lecture provided some good tools for getting your head around the fact that extra dimensions really do let you go around things, not through: https://youtu.be/1wAaI_6b9JE?t=2299 https://youtu.be/1wAaI_6b9JE?t=2299 (the whole thing is worth watching, but the bit about higher dimensional visualization starts there)
- drewolbrich 9y agoRelated: (iOS only) http://www.fourthdimensionapp.com http://www.fourthdimensionapp.com If you email me at temp6 at traipse.com I will send you a promo code for a free copy.
- gene-h 9y agoNow it's a cool toy, but there might be more practical applications for a 4D rigid body physics engine. Some materials design approaches[0] involve iterating through shape space to determine what shape a particle should be to get it to assemble into a desired structure. A 4D physics engine might be useful for this shape space iteration, as movement through shape space could be accomplished by moving a 4d rigid body along the 4th axis. [0]http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acsnano.5b04181 http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acsnano.5b04181
- based2 9y agohttps://translate.google.fr/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=fr&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Festhetopies.ihp.fr%2Findex.html&edit-text=&act=url https://translate.google.fr/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&js=y&prev=...
- ghusbands 9y agoThis and Miegekure show cross-sections or projections of a 4d space that are common but that show details that could not possibly be seen by functional 4D eyes. Are there any attempts out there at showing a 3D representation of what 4D eyes could see? (For example, if you have a solid 4D cube, you can only see the outside of it, but the cross-section shows parts of the inside, as happens you take 2D cross-sections of a 3D cube)
- JoeDaDude 9y agoThere are several 4D games, but the one I found gave me the best grasp of the 4D world is this one [1], a puzzle in which you manipulate a hypercube. You first play in 2D and 3D before going to 4D. You end up with an intuitive understanding of 4D. [1] http://harmen.vanderwal.eu/hypercube/ http://harmen.vanderwal.eu/hypercube/