mmm@iconsys.icon.com (Mark Muhlestein) (03/15/90)
One thing I have always been intrigued by since I read "Flatland" is whether or not it would be possible to become accustomed to higher dimensional spaces. Virtual reality should allow us to try this. In a 4-D cyberspace, for example, it should be possible to play a game of hide-and-seek in a 4 dimensional house, walk around and through a Klein bottle, etc. I had a friend in college who did his master's thesis on trying to visualize higher dimensional shapes. He used stereo wire frames and even made a movie of, e.g., a rotating tesseract, etc. Still, many of the images just looked like a bunch of lines moving in somewhat confusing patterns. I wanted to stop the film, grab the object and move it myself to try to understand it better. Perhaps one of the uses of this technology would be to allow mathematicians to use even more of our input modes to help "get a feel" for difficult and abstract concepts. Has anyone thought of or looked at this? -- Mark Muhlestein @ Sanyo/Icon uunet!iconsys!mmm