OK, this looks mind-warpingly fun.
VR has the advantage that it reproduces the way in which light rays hit each eye. In Euclidean space, staring at a point at infinity means that the lines of sight of the two eyes track parallel lines. But in a hyperbolic world, those two paths would veer apart, says Segerman, forcing a different response from the viewer. “Here, if you look at a point at infinity, you have to cross your eyes slightly.” To our “Euclidean brain”, that makes everything feel kind of close, he says.
But the smallness is deceptive. One of the oddest facts about hyperbolic space is its sheer vastness. Whereas in Euclidean space the surface area within a given radius grows as fast as the square of the radius, and the volume grows as fast as its cube, in hyperbolic space areas and volumes grow much (exponentially) faster relative to the radius. One consequence is that a user roaming a planet in the hyperbolic world finds much more to visit within walking distance.
So far, there is not much to do in the eleVR world, apart from exploring tilings made of geometric shapes such as pentagons and dodecahedra. But the team plans to build hyperbolic houses and streets, as well as interactive experiences such as playing a non-Euclidean version of basketball. The researchers hope that their open-source software will become popular with science museums and the growing legion of consumer VR enthusiasts.
http://www.nature.com/news/mathematicians-create-warped-worlds-in-virtual-reality-1.21689?WT.mc_id=GPL_NatureNews
There's a few games which play in non-euclidian geometries already (Hyperogue, Antichamber, some parts of Monument Valley), they're wonderfully weird but would be so much weirder in VR.
ReplyDeleteAnd then there's TARDISes. I want to see a full walk-through of one of those things.
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