Polychoron Explorer

Experience imaginary physical 4D world via perceiving its 3D projection.

Polychoron Explorer is an abmitious project under active development. Several exploratory and gaming modules are planned, of which 2 are available right now.

It is currently available on iOS, Android and Steam PC. MacOS, Linux builds are planned to be added.

Explorer does not have a gameplay goal or mechanics, rather it offers an oportunity to explore what imaginary 4D world's solid objects would look like to an imaginary 4D creature that would use a 3D sensor as vision system.

With Explorer tool you can observe 4D convex solids via either their 3D projection or hyperplane scanning.

There are 6 known regular polychorons and all of them can be selected and observed from any direction in Explorer mode.

Every cell of an observed polychoron can be assigned a color from the palette or it can be turned off by selecting Void color.

To change direction of view on the polychoron, player can use 6 rotation axes which are automatically selected to make navigation around polychoron feel more intuitive. This automatic selection is based on the player's observational position on 3D projection scene.

In Explorer mode, accumulating navigation model is used so user can rotate the local matrix around its own local axes. Axes can be assigned to sceen mouse axes as well as to keyboard and game controller axes on desktop PC.

In addition to 6 regular polychorons, it is possible to create new figures and observe them. This can be done in 2 ways:

Player can use the Cut command where a figure is separated into 2 parts using a cutting hyperplane. This is done in Scaninng mode where instead of the projection, a 3D intersection of a polychoron with hyperplane is displayed.

Player can also provide custon geometry via text file. This is available in PC version by placing files into game's settings folder. Further details can be provided by request.

Magic Manycell simulates an imaginary 4D object inspired by Magic Cube puzzle. In Magic Cube, each square side is divided into equal smaller squares all of which are independently colored. Then each 3x3x1 part of a cube can be independently rotated to create different combination of colors on affected cube sides after rotation.

By analogy, in Magic Manycell we use the 4D cube, or Tesseract, in which each cubic cell is divided into several smaller cubes and each cube is independently assigned a color. Then we separately rotate a 3x3x3x1 part of the tesseract by PI/2 to create a different combination of colors.

Puzzle is created by starting with a magic manycell with equally colored sides and then doing random rotations (called shuffles). After that player has to do the rotations (turns) to restore equal coloredness of all sides of tesseract.

Player can select how many shuffles are performed and whether to color all 8 sides of the tesseract into its own color (so there are 8 total colors) or color opposite sides into the same colors (so only 4 colors).

Player can also select 3 different variants of this puzzle: tesseract with 2x2x2 split cells, tesseract with 3x3x3 split cells, and a 16-cell.

With 16-cell version of the puzzle, cells are not actually split. Instead, groups of 4 cells that share the same edge are colored into the same color so there are 4 total colors. This puzzle offers different experience than tesseract based puzzle.