
4D Tesseract: Fourth Dimension Game - bladedtoys
http://www.fourthdimensiongame.com
======
Jun8
If you think that us 3D people will never be able to wrap their heads around
4D, you have to read Charles Hinton's
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Howard_Hinton](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Howard_Hinton))
_The Fourth Dimension_
([https://archive.org/details/fourthdimension00hintarch](https://archive.org/details/fourthdimension00hintarch)).
This is the guy who coined the terms _ana_ and _kata_ (from Greek) for the two
additional 4D directions, analogous to up/down, etc. (he also invented a
gunpowder baseball pitching machine that, some say, led to his dismissal from
Princeton, due to player injuries).

Now that's interesting on its own, but his sister-in-law, Alicia Boole Scott
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alicia_Boole_Stott](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alicia_Boole_Stott))
is also amazing. She was the daughter of the famous Boole, and made big
contributions to higher dimensional mathematics, especially 4D, e.g. she
proved there are exactly six regular polytopes in 4D. She "made beautiful
cardboard models" of 3D cross sections of these. This, while she was working
as a secretary in Liverpool (sad reality of early women
scientists/mathematicians).

They don't make them like that anymore! It would be interesting to have
documentary on 4D based on these interesting people.

EDIT: Also, in catastrophe theory, the Swallowtail catastrophe, which has 3
control and behavioral dimension was named by the French mathematician Bernard
Morin
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Morin](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Morin)),
who is blind since he was 6!

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zokier
Another 4D game: Miegakure
[http://marctenbosch.com/miegakure/](http://marctenbosch.com/miegakure/)

As referenced in a XKCD [http://xkcd.com/721/](http://xkcd.com/721/)

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Mithaldu
When you mention miegakure you should mention that it's been in development
for about as long as DNF and might be done in 2020. :)

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marctenbosch
Well, experimental games take a long time to make! It's to be expected.

~~~
Mithaldu
Of course. :)

I love every blog post you write and every image i see released of the game.

It's just that i've come to terms with the high possibility that i simply
might not get to play this game at any point.

I'm simply trying to say that the path to the realization should be made
easier for other people before they become enamored only to face the harsh
reality of the last paragraph on the game's website. ;)

~~~
marctenbosch
It's actually highly unlikely the game will not come out.

~~~
Mithaldu
It's heartening to see this confidence. That makes me happy. :)

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CodeCube
For those trying to wrap their heads around this ... I find this segment by
Carl Sagan from the original Cosmos to be pretty well presented on the topic:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnURElCzGc0](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnURElCzGc0)

~~~
keammo1
His explanation is more or less adapted from "Flatland: A Romance of Many
Dimensions"

[http://www.amazon.com/Flatland-Dover-Thrift-Editions-
Abbott/...](http://www.amazon.com/Flatland-Dover-Thrift-Editions-
Abbott/dp/048627263X)

~~~
pawn
I read that book in high school for extra credit in a math class, and really
enjoyed it.

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roywiggins
Whee, looks like fun!

Adanaxis[1] is a 4 dimensional space shooter- only sort of playable but still
fun.

[http://www.mushware.com/](http://www.mushware.com/)

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jsonmez
I'll just be the first to admit that I am indeed too dumb to grasp this
concept. I've stared at it for a long time, but I do not get it.

~~~
moron4hire
I think of it this way: if you try to draw a 3D cube on a 2D screen, what you
really have is a 2D image. If oriented correctly, and nobody told you anything
about that cube, you might mistake it for a 2D hexagon. If instead that cube
were rotating, you would see the change in the shape of the hexagon and
realize that the image is supposed to be a cube.

But the reality is, it's still a 2D image. It's just a representation, and
context and animation help you get back to the notion that it's a 3D image.

Now, think for a minute about how the screen works. There are rows and rows of
pixels. Each of those rows is actually a 1-dimensional image, a slice of the
whole. If you were to only see one row of pixels at a time, you'd not be able
to figure out what the image is. Maybe if you knew certain parameters about
the image, that it was of very low fidelity, simplistic shapes, you'd be able
to analyze one row after another and figure it out. You'd have extreme
difficulty just looking at a 1-dimensional image, or a serious of such, and
figuring out it would be of a 3-dimensional object. To really see the image,
you again need it animated. The rows are scanned out very quickly, and your
brain blurs it all together.

So, when you're dropping from N to N-1 dimensions, you lose something,
something that you can sort of get back if you add some motion in. When you
drop from N to N-2 or more, you lose so much that you have a really hard time
figuring it out.

Now we can finally come back to the tesseract. It's a 4D object. We're trying
to display it on a 2D display. It's not going to work out too well. You've
really got to stare at it, think about what is going on, understand that
you're dealing only with a very low fidelity, simplistic shape. Analyze it,
rotation after rotation, and you might be able to figure it out.

Or, in other words, it would be a lot easier if you had a real 3D display.

~~~
gliese1337
A 3D display doesn't help much; being able to take advantage of stereo effects
helps a little, since you can see it from multiple slightly different angles
at a time (one per eye). But your retina is still 2D- you can't perceive 3D
objects directly through the visual system, just 2D projections of them.

A native 4D creature would presumably have a 3D retina that can directly
perceive 3D projections of 4D objects and infer 4D structure from them like we
infer 3D structure from 2D projections. Maybe a tactile display could improve
things somewhat (though you'd still be lacking access to 3D-internal
structure), but as long as you're going through the human visual system, it
takes some significant effort to reconstruct the 3D projections and then go
the extra step to inferring 4D structure, no matter how good your display
technology is.

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NAFV_P
Reminds me of the time that Sting sang "Message in a klein bottle". Of course,
as soon as the bottle was thrown into the sea, the water seeped in destroying
the message on the paper.

"Bollocks", said Sting. "There goes my proof of the Riemann Hypothesis."

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dameyawn
Cool idea, and it has potential, but it's missing fun!

Touching all surfaces != fun.

Maybe collecting an item(s) on some surfaces could be ok.

Or a "finish line" box to go through on some surface.

It's more fun, IMO, to have specific goals.

Uninstalled for now but am excited to see where you might take it.

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BoppreH
A few months ago I made a 4D puzzle console game in Python:
[https://github.com/boppreh/anakata](https://github.com/boppreh/anakata)

It's an amazing experience to think of visualizations. I ended up with a grid
of grids, like you see in the readme. Each smaller grid is a 2D slice of the
world, each column a 3D stack, and the set of all columns the full 4D space.

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cpfohl
I've always thought a 4d first person game where you could toggle pairs of
dimensions could be really interesting. At any point you could swap between
wxy/wxz/xyz. The rendering would be standard 2d projections of the 3
dimensions you have toggled on...Add guns and you have the trippiest FPS I've
ever heard of.

~~~
cpfohl
Teach me to post before reading. Looks like someone already posted this exact
concept game...Although my idea always involved gravity somehow....

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csandreasen
For a more in-depth discussion on 4 dimensional geometry, I highly recommend
the Dimensions films[1], which are available for free download. It's a little
bit mind-bending, so to speak.

[1] [http://www.dimensions-math.org/Dim_E.htm](http://www.dimensions-
math.org/Dim_E.htm)

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jvandonsel
If I give this to my kids
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimsy_Were_the_Borogoves](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimsy_Were_the_Borogoves))
will they disappear?

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efferifick
Another 4D game: 4D rubik's cube!
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aonf34s0Bqg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aonf34s0Bqg)

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danmaz74
This could help...
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-WyreE9ZkI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-WyreE9ZkI)

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fredley
It doesn't work well on my Nexus 5, the tutorial text was clipped off the
edges, I can't seem to zoom out.

~~~
bladedtoys
I will look into that. Thank you for posting.

~~~
recursive
I'm getting the same behavior on a Motorola Photon 4g

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GhotiFish
Anyone else think it's funny how he labels w as a dotted anomaly, even though
z is just as anomalous?

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bdg
Please fix UI bugs like not being able to exit. :(

