Show HN: Hypersprawl – a metaverse with 4 spatial dimensions

[teemur]

https://www.brainpaingames.com/

Hi all,

Years ago I was wondering what kind of problems superhuman AI would be able to solve that would be difficult for humans. I came up with problems requiring higher dimensional spatial awareness. Scratching my head a bit further, the humble me started thinking that actually there is no reason why our brains could not handle higher spatial dimensions, if the brain was just given appropriate feedback from our sensory system. Fast forward a lot of further head scratching, and here is a barely MVP of a VR environment for 4 spatial dimensions, with some navigation aids including acoustic sensory augmentation (sounds fancier than it is...)

First I thought to have just the Hypershack where you can locally build 4d stuff on your browser, but then thought it would be cool to have also a 4d metaverse where you could share and see 4d things built by others - and there might be even a way to monetise this for me by renting real estate in there. So, that is Hypersprawl. To manage expectations, the performance is bad for now, I have limited the Hypersprawl to 10 4d objects per address.

You can use Hypershack for free, also there are lots of free addresses in Hypersprawl, only if you want to get closer to the Black Sun (sorry Stephenson, I couldn't not copy that), you need to make a donation or subscription. You do not need to have a VR headset to have a look, browser is enough, but of course immersion suffers quite a lot.

All feedback is more than welcome. Frankly, I do not expect this to be a major commercial success and actually I think this may be a bit too far in the fringes of geekiness to find anyone else interested, but I guess this community is one of the better places to try to prove me wrong.

(So, have I been successful in getting any intuition in 4 spatial dimensions? So far not much luck on that, only that the 4d space is huge. Literally mind-bogglingly huge. I think my next direction is to spend some time figuring out the pedagogy on what objects/functionality I should have there to get the intuition. But do not expect anything to be quick with this one, and I am talking more likely about years than months.)

Cheers,

Teemu

[jimmySixDOF]

Interesting. I tried to jump in from a Quest2 stand alone but need to get on a PCVR link and try if I can get the WebXR session to work. Just wanted to say I love that this is build for web so I can do it in the browser too. Big fan of 4Dtoys.com and this is a nice open addition !!! Thanks for building it.

[teemur → jimmySixDOF]

I decided to go with webxr to make it as accessible as possible. I am planning to buy a quest 2 as a travel kit, and was hoping that WebXR would work also on standalone quest. If that is no the case, I guess I need to build also some other versions, then.

[jimmySixDOF → teemur]

Meta have their own chromium fork in the Quest models and it is one of the better WebXR implementations so should actually be easier than getting it to work on a PC in VR mode. That said I saw you used Unity with the DePanther export tool and that is unfortunately not as great a fit as it could be if Unity took the Web and XR more seriously which they just don't. I was hoping Apple's announced support in Safari would help but seems to have had the opposite effect on Unity since they are only concentrating on the native app development partnership which makes sense but it's not good news for WebXR in general.

PS- If you're interested there is a dev community https://discord.gg/WebXR