Expand your Dimensions

If you have not already done so, I Highly Recommend that you read Hamlet Au’s piece on Seifert Surface’s “crooked house”. This very much falls into the category of “I wish I’d thought of that” - Mr Surface has created an experiential model of a four-dimensional cube (a tesseract) in the three dimensions of Second Life, by means of some trickery. One can walk through a building in a straight line and return to one’s starting point.

Watch the video first and see if you can work out how that could be done. The answer seems very obvious after you have seen it from the outside, but that is always the case with the best of such things.

For some reason this has impressed me far more than pretty much anything I have seen in Second Life so far, and stands up as a reason why, no matter what the social situation becomes with ban lines and changes and so on, SL will continue to remain something wonderful. Where else, pray tell, could one construct a hypercubic building to walk through?

I have mathematical and experimental and political and sociological interests, and whilst all of them are important to me, none entirely wins over the others. Perhaps it is my background that leads me to treat them all as intrinsically connected, thus I cannot help considering the political aspects of a technological development (and vice versa), but at times my sheer admiration for an achievement overwhelms other considerations. It may be a weakness but a dictator could gain my support by promising easy access to multidimensional housing.