What if you received a box filled with mysterious toys from a fourth spatial dimension?
Playfully explore and marvel at beautiful shapes powered by a groundbreaking 4D+time physics system.
Poke, throw, roll and watch as they disappear into a dimension you can't see.
Get an intuitive feel for how four-dimensional objects behave:
Become a child of the fourth dimension.
In this case the 4th dimension is not time but a 4th dimension of space that works just like the first three dimensions we are familiar with. If you count time these toys are 5D.
It turns out that the rules of how objects bounce, slide and roll around can be generalized to any number of dimensions, and this toy lets you experience what that would look like.
"Our inability to see all the dimensions of a 4-D world doesn't mean that we can't navigate it, that we can't reach out and feel it with our digital fingertips."
—Chris Suellentrop, Wired magazine
—Chris Suellentrop, Wired magazine
"I'm hesitant to describe a virtual reality experience as a "killer app" ever again, but I'm oh-so-tempted once more [...] I am not sure that I've ever seen a more compelling "show-don't-tell" educational tool than 4D Toys. "
—Sam Machkovech, Ars Technica
—Sam Machkovech, Ars Technica
Features:
- Over 100 beautiful interactive scenes to play with, with more to be added in updates.
- Groundbreaking 4D+Time Physics Engine that uses new published research created for this project.
- Virtual Reality or Mouse & Keyboard (PC) or Multi-touch & Accelerometer (iOS) support for rich interactivity.
- Bonus: 2D/3D "Flatland" Interactive Explanation teaches by analogy about a fourth spatial dimension:
Some things to do:
- Manage to fit the hypercube into the hyperhole!
- Use the 4D shapes as fancy, perfectly symmetric, fair dice that have 5, 8, 16, 24, or even 120 and 600 sides!
- When a die is fair the probability that it lands on a particular face is the same for every face. This is done by making all the faces the same shape.
However in 3D only a certain number of shapes have this property, such as:
In 4D we have additional possible shapes for dice!
- When a die is fair the probability that it lands on a particular face is the same for every face. This is done by making all the faces the same shape.
However in 3D only a certain number of shapes have this property, such as:
- Make a stack of 4D hypercubes and smash it!
- Set up an interesting path for a few 4D dominoes!
- Unbind Rings using the fourth dimension!
- Make levers that throw hypercubes into the fourth dimension!
- Use multitouch to "squeeze" out objects into the fourth dimension!
- Play in a 4D ball pit!
- See Tesseracts (i.e. 4D hypercubes) slide down slopes!
- Play with a non-intersecting 4D Klein Bottle!
- etc...!
>> Media / Screenshots / Downloads
>> More details for those curious about the mathematics
>> Background
>> Undirected 4D play
By Marc ten Bosch, who is also currently working on the 4D game Miegakure (Hide & Reveal).
Follow 4D toys on: Marc ten Bosch's Blog, Youtube, Mailing list, Twitter.
Follow 4D toys on: Marc ten Bosch's Blog, Youtube, Mailing list, Twitter.
"Meanwhile, in the adjoining room, Emma was sliding the beads to and fro in the abacus. The motions didn't seem so strange now. Even when the beads vanished. She could almost follow that new direction—almost—"
—Lewis Padgett, Mimsy Were the Borogoves