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4D Toys: a box of four-dimensional toys

marctenbosch.com

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Re: 4D Toys: a box of four-dimensional toys

#101

Post by jameshart »

nautilus12 wrote: post #100

This 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…

I 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

(the whole thing is worth watching, but the bit about higher dimensional visualization starts there)

Re: 4D Toys: a box of four-dimensional toys

#102

Post by aboodman »

thsowers wrote: post #61
aboodman wrote: post #60

I 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.

Same thing happened to me, I think I fixed by swiping left

I'm seriously swiping as hard as I can in every direction.

Re: 4D Toys: a box of four-dimensional toys

#103

Post by andai »

js8 wrote: post #37
malnourish wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 abilit…

Could you please explain how the ability to navigate 3D world influences our general cognitive capabilities?

Re: 4D Toys: a box of four-dimensional toys

#104

Post by panic »

Benjamin_Dobell wrote: post #93
Benjamin_Dobell wrote: post #87

Odd. 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

I'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.

I'm seeing the same thing. It looks like the app is calling -[UITraitCollection forceTouchCapability], which isn't available on iOS 8.

Re: 4D Toys: a box of four-dimensional toys

#105

Post by gtremper »

HiroshiSan wrote: post #97
p1mrx wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We see in 2D, with a tiny bit of depth metadata. True 3D vision would allow you to look at someone, and see the entire volume of all their internal organs simultaneously.

Wouldn't that be xray vision?

An xray is still a 2D projection, just with different wavelength light.

Re: 4D Toys: a box of four-dimensional toys

#107

Post by gene-h »

Now 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

Re: 4D Toys: a box of four-dimensional toys

#108

Post by nanistheonlyist »

fao_ wrote: post #99
mabbo wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A favorite novel of mine actually! Hard to believe that it was written in the 1800s, yet still Abbott understood the 4th dimension better than most people today.

> Hard to believe that it was written in the 1800s Aside from all the misogyny and the style of writing, you mean?

Virtue signal a little harder, I dont't think they can hear you in the fourth dimension.

Re: 4D Toys: a box of four-dimensional toys

#109

Post by wruza »

jacobolus wrote: post #74
jerf wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?" Yes, you can. This program just doesn't.

There’s a big problem with that, which is that we don’t actually see in 3 dimensions. Our eyes only get 2-dimensional projections of a 3-dimensional world.

Our eyes could get 2-dimensional projections of any more-dimensional world, actually, if it was available. The light-sensitive outline of that little guy in the video could accept photons from any 4-direction, and not only photons floating in his current 2-plane.

Ofc it is abstraction, I know that physicists aren't happy with heterodimensional settings at human scale.

Re: 4D Toys: a box of four-dimensional toys

#110

Post by hoprocker »

indspenceable wrote: post #40
yathern wrote: post #15

This 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 dimensio…

The 2D->3D analogy made sense to me -- only being able to see the cross-section that is visible in a current dimensionality -- but I got to wondering if you couldn't use some of techniques from information visualization techniques to show a representation of that extra dimension in the current dimensional landscape (ie fading the object as it gets farther away from the current dimension).
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