Live data from Hacker News

Desmos 3D graphing calculator

desmos.com

31–40 of 87 posts

Re: Desmos 3D graphing calculator

#33
This looks nice, and I could see using it in some cases when I teach 3D functions, especially for complex functions that require more accuracy. But when introducing 3D it's often nicer to have graphs that showing gridding rather than smooth curves. For most purposes I'll probably stick to CalcPlot3D. It also has some nice features for showing points and vectors on a function, doing contour plots, and a nice surface of revolution visualization.

https://c3d.libretexts.org/CalcPlot3D/index.html

Re: Desmos 3D graphing calculator

#34

This is fantastic! So easy to move, zoom and rotate the graph with exactly the mouse buttons you'd expect. In most even commercial math packages this is always super clunky

How does one move with the mouse? I could only find gestures for rotation and zoom; for movement I had to resort to manually entering coordinates in the settings.

Re: Desmos 3D graphing calculator

#37

Well it passes the sin(x)sin(y)sin(z)>0.1 test Edit: also sin(x)sin(y)sin(z)+0.1sin(10x)sin(10y)sin(10z)>0.1 https://www.desmos.com/3d/85d41ad6c6

My phone gets pretty warm when I zoom out but the UI remains nice and responsive …

the actual rendering code is ran using a webworker in a separate thread

Re: Desmos 3D graphing calculator

#38

Desmos is the best, free (as in cost) and easily accessible graphing calculator out there. I wish it was opensource though. I've even tried to make an alternative and it's really hard to match their functionality (or I'm just inexperienced). I hope an opensource alternative crops up. Edit: Seems there has https://www.geogebra.org/

Commercial usage og Geogebra needs a license.

https://www.geogebra.org/m/pR5DME5S#material/yumfrbjr

I don't understand how their license and the GPL can co-exist?

Re: Desmos 3D graphing calculator

#39
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using GeoGebra for years. I have tried Desmos twice but couldn't immediately spot the differences. What are the benefits of Desmos over GeoGebra?

I haven't heard of GeoGebra before! Really cool. Thanks for pointing that out.

I just want to chime in on Geogebra. I used it (was more or less forced to) when teaching math in high school for about 12 years. It is great for guided exploration, but it is very buggy. I am confident many students must have lost points in their math exams because of some of those bugs.

Re: Desmos 3D graphing calculator

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was using Chrome 117, looks like there was a new 118 update, it now is butter smooth! Looks like 117 was just broken

Nice! Really good to know. We'll add that to our list of device/browser combos that might cause trouble so that at minimum we can warn folks. It's an early beta so we're enthusiastically collecting any examples (system configurations and also graphs) that cause problems, so if you see anything amiss we'd love to hear about it (feedback@desmos.com). [disclaimer: I work at Desmos]

Since you work at Desmos: is there any way to have animated variables start/stop based on the value of some other variable? Or functions that graph different formulas based on a conditional? Etc.

For example, variable X is continuously cycling between -10 and +10, but only when variable D is > 1. At my son's school, there is a kind of interactive demoscene going on using Desmos (the kids believe that the school cannot block Desmos from the Chromebooks, therefore they will always have it available).

Post reply on HN