This is very cool. It reminds me of the classic geometry novel Flatland. If you like thinking about dimensionality I highly recommend it...
4D Toys: a box of four-dimensional toys
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Re: 4D Toys: a box of four-dimensional toys
#32The 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.
Same 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 w…
Another 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.
Re: 4D Toys: a box of four-dimensional toys
#33If 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.
If you 4D print a tesseract, I would suspect you of witchcraft.
Re: 4D Toys: a box of four-dimensional toys
#34[deleted]
Re: 4D Toys: a box of four-dimensional toys
#35This 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…
I 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.
You 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.
Re: 4D Toys: a box of four-dimensional toys
#36This 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…
I 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.
You'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)
Re: 4D Toys: a box of four-dimensional toys
#37This 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…
I 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.
SW might have been disproven, but in this case, I think it would make a difference.
I think if you had to have 4D vision rather than 3D, it would require much more processing power and memory to account for the extra dimension. So I think at minimum, a being that is capable of thinking in 4D would have to have higher brain capacity than a being that thinks just in 3D.
And there is some strong evidence that our ability to navigate 3D world influences our general cognitive capabilities. For example, consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
Re: 4D Toys: a box of four-dimensional toys
#38This 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…
I 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.
I think the problem is that the mild amount of support was the only claim it was ever making. It was everyone else who blew it out of proportion. It's like the whole thing with CERN making micro black holes, and everyone freaking out about a black hole eating the solar system.
Re: 4D Toys: a box of four-dimensional toys
#39Love the idea! Unfortunately it's not compatible with iOS plus-sized screens :(
I'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.
Same issue here. Has anyone reached out to the developer?
Re: 4D Toys: a box of four-dimensional toys
#40This 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…
Often when I see something about 4d it uses this same analogy: a 2d being seeing a crosssection of a 3d world, in 2d. However, the video is in 2d, and it's able to show 3d in a much better/more clear way, clearly, cause when it's showing that example it's got a cutout of the "3d" view (which is still 2d!).
Why can't we do the same thing with 4d? Why does the object just disappear when it bounces into the 4th dimension, can't we maybe see a projection of it onto the 3rd dimension?