Dimensional Baby Steps

[gonegahgah]

I did up the following animation for the 'locate' view but now I'm thinking that I need to do a different animation:



I'm thinking that this would actually generate quite a confusing landscape for us 3Ders.
It might actually be natural for a 4Der as one of their head movements but I think it would probably be quite disorientating for us.

The movement here involves moving both the foward and side directions kata-wards simultaneously.
Kind of a dual rotation or spin rotation I'm guessing.
The landscape would change drastically as all points of orientation change at once.
This is what I am seeking to avoid; in order to help us navigate the 4D world more easily.

I think I have a better way of providing us with the locate view that is more natural for us.
I'll draw that up soon...

[gonegahgah]

Here is my depiction of what I think helps to illustrate, more correctly this time, the 'locate' view:

Locate View


The subtle difference between this one and the 'interact' view is that here the front direction rotates into the 4th direction; whereas in the 'interact' view the left-right direction rotates into the 4th direction. If you look at the above animation you should be able to see that left and right stay where they were but it is the front direction that rotates into the 4th direction now. I could have drawn parallel back-front planes to illustrate this more but hopefully this shows the idea.
I guess that even makes sense now that one view should rotate the left-right into the 4th direction and the other view would rotate the back-front into the 4th direction.

So when rotating, whilst in the 'locate' view, objects to the left and right stay to the left and right but objects off in the 4th direction rotate down or up into our 3D plane.
This allows us to easily locate and move towards objects that aren't in our current 3D plane.

To reiterate, from previous posts, the following helps to illustrate the other view; the 'interact' view:

Interact View


When rotating, whilst in the 'interact' view, objects to the very front stay in front and rotation into the 4th direction allows us to look at them through their ana and kata angles for more intimate searching and interaction with those objects.

I'm thinking that switching between the two views won't actually change the view you see. So switching views wouldn't actually produce any landscape change before you.
Instead, it will change how the scene will rotate, with respect to the 4th direction, when rotating into it: that is either objects rotating directly in front of you, or else objects moving from out of the 4th direction into your front view.

Time to try and draw an example I think. I will give it a try now with the 'road bends ahead' sign.
Hopefully this will show us an example of what we would see when we combine the rotation and projection methods.

[wendy]

This is pretty close to what happens in the across space. In our space, across-space is a line with left-right, so all we can do (by keeping up/forward constant), is shuffle left/right.

Here you can imagine a kind of 'rotary shuffle'. Imagine N feet (say, three or four). You move one foot left-to-kata, and then the next foot moves to fill the left. What happens is this little screen rotates, (because it's part of the person's individual frame), but the ground doesn't. So a church at 'left', will on a spot of rotoshuffle, become kata, without the person changing the forward-upwards direction.

And since there is nothing to fix 'left' absolutely relative to height/forward, since the whole circle is at right-angles to these here. Different people could then be standing up and facing forward, and all one is seeing is different orientations of these names. The only thing constant is that the arrow does not change direction.

[gonegahgah]

Cool, I like that notion of shuffling to illustrate the diagram Wendy. Side-stepping, or side shuffling as you've described, is a good example of the directional effect afforded by 'across' space. As you say, in our 3D space shuffling sideways can only be left and right; but in 4D shuffling sideways, can not only be done in a straight direction somewhere sideways but, can also be done (in a sideways fashion too) by rotating on the spot in the 360° of sideways space afforded by 'across' in 4D.

Thanks for that Wendy. That does hopefully help to explain the 4D sideways further and to show how more generalised it is.
I do agree with QuickFur that the 4Der would tend to attribute the number of primary sideways directions based upon their number of limbs. I meant to respond to that and I apoligise if I forgot to acknowledge this addition of yours QuickFur. As Wendy says, rotating makes this a little ambiguous, but I would still tend to think they would tend to have as many sideways direction names as sideways limbs. Though, how you decide which limb is which is probably a little more confusing for them. We usually have a dominant arm so maybe their names would based upon: 'main dominant arm', 'arm clockwise (probably not a good word and maybe ambiguous itself) to dominant arm', 'arm 2nd clockwise to dominant arm', etc.

[gonegahgah]

Thanks Wendy, I also now just realised that the 'interact' view I've depicted is basically just us doing the rotational side-step you described.

Interact View


The other view, the 'locate' view, is a similar sort of rotation but we are forward + one sideways direction side-stepping around in a circle on the spot.

[gonegahgah]

Hey, I was wondering if putting things on this web site would count as prior art when it comes to patent disputes.
I have to admit, I'm fairly annoyed at Apple - and others no doubt - being able to be granted patents on obvious features.

For example, I'm thinking that the best way to navigate in a 4D world is to do so with two mice; one for each hand.
Will writing about that here prevent Apple putting a patent on the notion of using two (or more) mice at once?

A couple of their present patents are for ideas that I have thought of before they ever patented them: such as multi-touch displays.
That is just so obvious, but far reaching, that no patent should ever be granted for ideas like that.
It should also be disallowed because existing items dictate that it will not just be obvious but necessary.
A piano keyboard on a touch screen obviously requires multi-touch. That goes without saying...

[quickfur]

This thread seems to have fallen asleep. Here's to hoping that we will see the ultimate result of gonegahgah's approach to 4D visualization, 'cos it sure is interesting.

As for patents, I'll just say frankly that I'm no fan of the current patent situation. The original intent of patents is to give an incentive to inventors to create new things, by giving them the benefit of a limited-time monopoly on said inventions. Nowadays, however, this has devolved into a "who can grab more clubs first" game, where instead of innovating, large corporations squat on as many patents as possible to beat competitors over the head with. This has the effect of stifling inventions -- you don't dare to invent something that's too close to an existing thing for fear of getting sued. But the truth of the matter is, most inventions are based on prior inventions -- the innovation comes from combining existing inventions in new and novel ways. But now you're practically not allowed to use existing inventions, so you have to start with sticks and stones. There's not many new things that you can make with sticks and stones, that haven't already been made. Today's situation is completely the opposite of what was intended.

[gonegahgah]

Thanks QuickFur. I apologise because I've been tired and flat out doing other things.
I do hope to put together the picture and continue the line of discussion that was coming out of it.

I know what I want to draw for this discussion. Unfortunately the software won't do it automatically for me.
It will be a process of monotonously and painfully rotating, cross-cutting, and overlaying to produce the example so that should be heaps of fun spent fiddly time
It will look like the result of multiple rotated frames overlaid. So, the more sub-angles of rotation utilised the more images that will be overlaid on each other.

I'll have to use very high transparency so that we can still see something I hope. On my first try I plan to use 98% transparency!
It would be even more difficult to produce a more preferable surface representation without writing software specifically to do so I have the feeling...

Kudos on the patent laws. They need to be re-examined with respect to their original intent.

[ac2000]

Hi gonegahgah,

It will be a process of monotonously and painfully rotating, cross-cutting, and overlaying to produce the example so that should be heaps of fun spent fiddly time
It will look like the result of multiple rotated frames overlaid. So, the more sub-angles of rotation utilised the more images that will be overlaid on each other.

Do you still make all the images in Corel and layer them by hand? This sounds like an awful lot of work. Maybe it would be worthwhile to consider POV-Ray for this task again, because things like rotations as well as varying transparency and such can be done with while loops and/or clock variable to have the single images for an animation done automatically. I'm far from being an expert in Pov-Ray animations because I usually use it for stills. But from what you describe it ought to be just the right program to do a job like this without too much tedious work, although it might be difficult in the beginning to get familiar with the software. But although being a little difficult, I always found it quite entertaining even if in the beginning the results might be somewhat different from what one had expected.

I attached some links to basic Pov-Ray tutorials that might be helpful for such tasks, just in case you might be interested.

Basic POV Tutorials Overview:
http://www.f-lohmueller.de/pov_tut/pov__eng.htm
Tutorial on While Loops /Linear Transformations:
http://www.f-lohmueller.de/pov_tut/loop/povlup1e.htm
Tutorials on Animations with clock Variable:
http://www.f-lohmueller.de/pov_tut/animate/anim001e.htm
http://www.f-lohmueller.de/pov_tut/animate/anim11e.htm