![]() For example, I built a lot of the complex 4D collision detection code used in Miegakure for 4D Toys. ![]() It uses the same engine as Miegakure, and many improvements I made to it have hugely benefited Miegakure. It’s the first time anyone has seen these objects as physical objects that bounce and roll and can be grabbed!ĤD Toys was a very fun side project. Most representations of a fourth dimension are so abstract (a spinning bundle of lines) and my work has been to get away from that. It’s so exciting to me to see a pile of hypercubes or a rolling 120-cell. Alternatively, one can just look at how pretty it is, like the waves rolling down the ocean, or the intricate swirling patterns in a fire. They can learn about making stacks, and gravity, and fitting shapes into holes, and that could form the foundation for future, verbal, learning. Play is undirected and we don’t expect a child to come up with verbal realizations of what they are doing. Since the toys are 4D, that’s sort of true: you have no experience playing with 4D shapes. It’s just 4D shapes, as if you were a very young kid again and given a box of wooden toys. More details about the design of 4D Toys Undirected 4D PlayĤD Toys doesn’t take you through carefully-constructed successively harder challenges the way Miegakure does. But I kept adding new shapes like hyperspheres, etc… and it got out of hand, so the dice theme didn’t fit anymore, and I named it simply “4D Toys.” At first it was very simple and based around the idea that in 4D you can have interesting new dice shapes like a perfectly symmetrical 600-sided die, or a 4D hypercube die with 8 faces (each of them a cube). But then I started thinking about making a stand-alone iOS toy to play with 4D objects, to take full advantage of the physics. I was only planning to use 4D physics a little bit for Miegakure as a purely aesthetic component, since dynamic physics is a bit too unpredictable to make good puzzles with. At first I was skeptical it was going to be possible at all, but in the end the mathematics fit together so well. My initial goal in making this was to have a ton of fun inventing the math for it. It evolved into a 4D physics-based toy box that you can get right now, for iOS (Multitouch & Accelerometer) and Steam (both VR (Vive) and Mouse/Keyboard).īasically it turns out the rules of how objects bounce, slide, fall, spin and roll around can be generalized to any number of dimensions, and this toy lets you experience what that would look like. So I made one for fun, and kept working on it on the side. Near the very beginning of Miegakure’s development, someone joked I should do a “4D physics engine.” Then a year or so later I had gathered enough knowledge (especially in geometric algebra) that it was a possibility. Surprise! Today I am releasing something! I think it’s about time that I share some of them, so… ![]() So I have been working on Miegakure for a long time now, and I have created and accumulated many cool 4D things of all sorts. ![]()
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