3D printing technology is definitely conquering one domain at a time, slowly taking over the world. The entertainment industry was only the beginning, just the first avant-post of the empire that 3D printing is about to start building, in this world. Whether it is about movie or stories, the third-dimension is making all of us look deeper into tomorrow’s ways with a sense of novelty and the promise of the future. It is obvious, indeed, that we have always lived in a three-dimensional environment, that we are programmed to see and even imagine things in 3D. The new concept of the fourth-dimension (4D), however, still raises a lot odf questions, even for the most qualified mathematicians, after two centuries of research.
Should we decide that it is impossible for us to create 4D objects in our given universe, artists and mathematicians of the Oklahoma State University are creating an innovative way to show us what the shadows of a 4D cube—also known as a Tesseract—would look like in reality.
How 3D printing art is made?
The method was reveiled last weekend at the annual meeting of AAAS (the American Association for the Advancement of Science) in California. During the presentation, the idea of trying to visualize a 4D object is compared to a person living in a 2D ‘flatland’ that is trying to imagine a cube. In order to explain the concept of a cube one could shine a light above it in order to project the cube’s shadow. In the same respect, you could make it possible by squishing a four-dimensional shape into three-dimensional space.
The idea somehow reminds of stereographic projections, This describes the process and reults of a light source that hits a three-dimensional object and projects its image onto a flat surface. Stereographic projection is currently being used to help make maps of the Earth and of the sky.
Should you be really curious to get the the math and science behind the project, you can watch the video of the presentation, or read the detailed explanation. Or check out all the mode that are beautifully presented hereand here.
