Show HN: A rudimentary game engine to build four dimensional VR evironments(brainpaingames.com)
brainpaingames.com
Show HN: A rudimentary game engine to build four dimensional VR evironments
https://www.brainpaingames.com/Hypershack.html
2 comments
Thanks for posting, will have to try it out later. I hope it works with my HP Reverb through Windows MR and/or Steam VR.
Re: pedagogy. Here is an anecdote. The very old Java game linked below is a 4d puzzle where players would have to rotate a tesseract to pass a ball through a hole. Comments made at the time were that players would fumble for a while but would eventually "get it" and after that the play was simple and obvious. I never got to that point. Maybe I'll fire it up and see if I can do better now.
http://harmen.vanderwal.eu/hypercube/
Re: pedagogy. Here is an anecdote. The very old Java game linked below is a 4d puzzle where players would have to rotate a tesseract to pass a ball through a hole. Comments made at the time were that players would fumble for a while but would eventually "get it" and after that the play was simple and obvious. I never got to that point. Maybe I'll fire it up and see if I can do better now.
http://harmen.vanderwal.eu/hypercube/
Very cool! Your page could do with some screenshots, but even now, I hope I’ll remember about your project next time I break out my Quest 2.
The sole purpose of this project is to explore whether it's possible to make the human brain spatially aware of four dimensions using Virtual Reality. It’s my first ever game project, my first time using Unity, first time writing C#, and my first anything with WebXR, so please be gentle! To manage expectations, it isn't visually pleasing yet and it's not easily approachable. To get anything out of this, you likely need a pen and a paper and draw 3d slices of 4d objects _many_ times.
The project is essentially a rudimentary engine where you can use JavaScript to define 4D objects and some limited behaviors. You can then explore these spaces in a browser (with or without a VR headset), moving and rotating through all four dimensions—including double rotations on planes like xz and yw.The game is a webxr project, meaning you can just play that on the browser, even without VR headset. Note, however, that the keyboard input is a bit limited.
As a demo, I've built a simple maze game where you try to find gems before time runs out. The challenge ramps up, and I'm currently stuck trying to comfortably navigate Level 6, which involves moving around four separate tesseracts. Here is a page where I have tried to visualize what is going on at level 6: https://www.brainpaingames.com/blog/updates/2024/07/28/Hyper...
I have no expectations that this will any day be anything but a niche project of mine, but I thought here might be someone interested in playing around. And If anyone has any ideas how the pedagogy of learning to operate in 4 spatial dimensions could be made somehow more achevable, I'm all ears.