Ben Sigma

We manage to visualize 3D objects and spaces effectively on a 2D screen. Can we teach ourselves to visualize 4D objects and spaces on a 3D virtual reality viewer? This piece explores whether intuition can be built around higher dimensional spaces through direct interaction with four spatial dimensions and one time dimension. Tesseracts, 16-cells and other 4D polyhedra are visible in a visceral way. A stereoscopic projection maps the fourth spatial dimension to a 3D slice that can be rotated. Color and texture indicate 4D distance and orientation. Nearby objects are easy and intuitive to interact with while distant objects in the 4D direction become translucent but still visible.