{"id":2156,"date":"2009-10-30T05:28:07","date_gmt":"2009-10-30T12:28:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/palblog.fxpal.com\/?p=2156"},"modified":"2009-10-29T23:42:16","modified_gmt":"2009-10-30T06:42:16","slug":"my-dream-virtual-almost-reality-exhibit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/?p=2156","title":{"rendered":"My dream virtual (almost) reality exhibit"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of weeks ago I attended the SIAM\/ACM Joint Conference on Geometric and Physical Modeling<\/a> and heard a lovely talk by Richard Riesenfeld. Riesenfeld and his wife Elaine Cohen were this year\u2019s B\u00e9zier award winners<\/a> for their work in computer aided geometric design (CAGD). He spoke about his correspondence with B\u00e9zier and showed us many of the letters they sent back and forth in the early days of CAD\/CAM, with their many hand drawn diagrams and the typed text with the math symbols added in by hand. I spent the time marveling at how they managed to have an effective collaboration over such an impoverished communication channel. But even with all of the wonderful 3D rendering capabilities we have today, it is still hard to communicate about 3D objects and spaces over a distance. Having a visual rendering is not sufficient. Spatial reasoning requires more. Riesenfeld mentioned B\u00e9zier\u2019s view that \u201ctouch is more discriminative than eyes.\u201d<\/p>\n

This theme reminded me that I\u2019ve been meaning to describe and send to the math factory<\/a> folks \u00a0a suggestion for an exhibit in the math museum.<\/a> Instead, I\u2019ll first write about it here.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Many years ago I was caught by the fascinating story surrounding the problem of \u201ceverting\u201d the sphere. While I loved the story, and had seen a movie <\/a>of a sphere eversion, I never felt I fully understood how a sphere eversion is done. I needed to be able to play with it the way you play with clay with your hands. Michael J. McGuffin has gone part of the way there, with a lovely application <\/a>that supports choosing various vantage points and renderings as you step through a sphere eversion. The next step would be to a virtual reality application that supports playing with sphere deformations with your hands. The trickiest part is designing a good interface and effective haptic feedback through virtual reality gloves.<\/p>\n

This sort of application shows virtual reality at its best: its strength is being able to do something based on reality, but going beyond it in some way. \u201cEverting\u201d the sphere means turning it inside out by a \u201cregular homotopy,\u201d which roughly means that the surface is allowed to pass through itself, but creasing and tearing are not allowed. (The movie,<\/a> or McDuff’s application<\/a>, will give you a better sense for what this means.)\u00a0 A VR interface for sphere eversion would need to support fine control of the sphere surface, allow a surface to pass through itself (which is easy in VR), and disallow moves that cause creases.<\/p>\n

I now describe the problem and its history. Silvio Levy gives a excellent brief history<\/a>. Here I give a briefer one. In 1957, Smale proved some general results having to do with sphere immersions, mappings of a sphere into three dimension spaces that are smooth but can self-intersect. The renowned mathematician Bott told him he was wrong largely because the results implied that the sphere could be everted, something that seemed impossible. The proof was checked, and held up, which meant that the sphere could be inverted. But no one knew how to do it. Smale\u2019s proof, strictly speaking, was constructive, but as Levy <\/a>puts it \u201cIt is akin to describing what happens to the ingredients of a souffl\u00e9 in minute detail, down to the molecular chemistry, and expecting someone who has never seen a souffl\u00e9 to follow this “recipe” in preparing the dish.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the first people to understand how to evert the sphere was Bernard Morin. It is tempting to say \u201cone of the first people to see how\u201d except that would be inaccurate; Bernard Morin was blind. Part of the reason the story captured my imagination was that I had long felt that my spatial sense was not visual so much as physical. As Levy says, the fact that Morin was blind is \u201cconvincing proof that “visualization” goes far beyond the physical sense of sight.\u201d Spatial sense has more in common with touch, and is closely tied to proprioception, the sense that tells us where our body parts are. It is through proprioception that we know where our hand is even when we cannot see it. My sense is that if I could just \u201cget my hands on it,\u201d I could understand the process of everting the sphere.<\/p>\n

The technology to do create such an exhibit is either already here, or very close. Any takers?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of weeks ago I attended the SIAM\/ACM Joint Conference on Geometric and Physical Modeling and heard a lovely talk by Richard Riesenfeld. Riesenfeld and his wife Elaine Cohen were this year\u2019s B\u00e9zier award winners for their work in computer aided geometric design (CAGD). He spoke about his correspondence with B\u00e9zier and showed us […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[126,109,27,61],"tags":[331,327],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2156"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2156"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2156\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2187,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2156\/revisions\/2187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}