What’s beyond the representation of the real world, beyond the simulation of an imaginary one? A deep immersion in new languages and possibilities of VR, in that place that’s between arts and sciences.
Sabetta Matsumoto will guide us in worlds that are far away from our native perception experiences, thanks to an uncommon and rather unexplored application of what could be otherwise considered “educational VR,” allowing us to experience in first person mathematical and geometrical worlds that are considered unintuitive and exotic.
The properties of Euclidean space seem natural and obvious to us, to the point that it took mathematicians over two thousand years to see an alternative to Euclid’s parallel postulate. The eventual discovery of hyperbolic geometry in the 19th century shook our assumptions, revealing just how strongly our native experience of the world blinded us from consistent alternatives, even in a field that many see as purely theoretical.
Non-euclidean spaces are still seen as unintuitive and exotic, but with direct immersive experiences, we can get a better intuitive feel for them. The latest wave of virtual reality hardware, in particular, the HTC Vive, tracks both the orientation and the position of the headset within a room-sized volume, allowing for such an experience. We use this nascent technology to explore the three-dimensional geometries of the Thurston/Perelman geometrization theorem. This talk focuses on our simulations of H³ and H²×E.
Date and time for this talk at IVRPA Belfast 2019 are TBD.
Presented by
Sabetta Matsumoto
Dr. Sabetta Matsumoto Assistant Professor, School of Physics, Georgia Tech. I'm a theoretical physicist, physics professor, applied mathematician. Interested in geometry, low dimensional topology and mathematical art (and cats).