Hyperdimensional Flutter
An interactive 3D experiment: 720 polyhedral pieces advected by a fluid flow field, rotating through a fourth dimension — fluttering, evolving, and periodically scattering.
A toy, not a thesis. I asked for “hyperdimensional fluttering rotating evolving pieces randomly scattering with fluid dynamics,” so I built exactly that: 720 polyhedral pieces living in a flow field, each one rotating through a fourth spatial dimension before being projected back into 3D.
The five systems
- Fluid dynamics — every piece is advected by a curl-noise-style flow field wrapped around a slow global vortex, with gentle vertical breathing.
- Hyperdimensional rotation — each piece carries a w coordinate; the whole cloud rotates in the XW and ZW planes, then gets perspective-projected back into 3D, so pieces swell and shrink as they swing through the fourth dimension.
- Fluttering — a high-frequency sinusoidal shimmer along a per-piece axis, so nothing ever sits still.
- Evolving — scale pulses and hue drifts continuously; the palette never repeats.
- Random scattering — every 8–16 seconds a burst detonates at a random point, flinging nearby pieces outward with an expanding shockwave ring before the flow field recaptures them.
Controls
Drag to orbit, scroll to zoom. Pause the universe, hit Scatter to detonate a burst on demand, toggle the 4D spin, or drag the speed slider. Same seed every visit — the same universe, every time.
Other Ideas