Fourmilab Tesseract for the Second Life virtual world has now been released and is available for free, with full permissions (copy/modify/transfer) from the Second Life Marketplace. It provides models of a four-dimensional hypercube and two other four-dimensional regular polytopes (the 5- and 16-cell) which are projected into the three-dimensional space of the Second Life virtual world. It responds to commands sent via chat or from a notecard script to allow rotating or spinning the object around any plane or planes in the four dimensional space, with the three-dimensional wire frame model immediately updated, allowing one to develop an intuitive sense for objects in four dimensions. Projection from four-dimensional space to three-dimensional space can be either parallel (orthographic) or perspective. The model may be rezzed in the world or attached to an avatar (usually worn as a hat).
The object is fully programmable from scripts defined in notecards and includes a user-defined menu system which allows linked and hierarchical menus to control it. A demonstration script is included, as well as an example showing how the handedness (chirality) of three-dimensional objects may be changed by rotating them through the fourth dimension. A “Mega” version which supports four-dimensional objects with up to 96 edges, allowing display of the 24-cell icositetrachoron, is included, but has a land impact of 97 and requires land with sufficient free capacity to use. For complete details, see the Fourmilab Tesseract User Guide, included as a help file with the product.
Source code for this project is maintained on and available from its GitHub repository.
