The creation of a digital medium that matches our sensory bandwidth is being used as with most new technologies to simulate the familiar. Non-Euclidean space implies in effect that the very fabric of our world may curve, with the implication that the shortest distance between two points may in fact not be a line, similar in effect to the realisation of the earth being round. In Minkowski space-time, time was conceived as continuous extra dimension, resulting in the notion that reality consists of a series of frames of space, set out along a time dimension. In turn, the idea of an extra dimension, be it time or an invisible spatial dimension perpendicular to normal space, became known amongst artist, writers and the general populace as the fourth dimension. Artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Malevich, Mondrian, Kandinsky and Lissitsky were inspired by the existence of a fourth dimension, exploring representations of time, multidimensional space, the meaning of colour and form, striving towards higher dimensions than could not be achieved by simply mimicking reality.
Rigid material is abolished and replaced by gaseous materials.
Kant believed that causality and our notions of time are created by sensory mechanisms that defined the very things we take for granted as being out there - in reality. In order to realise these ideals, current vr models and tools need to be examined and challenged with the aim of creating alternative paradigms for manipulating virtual space. Before commencing to speculate on an alternative paradigm, I will briefly state my interpretation of the current virtual reality model and why it is limiting when one considers modelling forms inspired by ideas of a fourth dimension. A virtual camera is created that follows the laws of perspective in order to produce a viewing plane by which the 3d space may be seen. Objects are generally defined as surfaces, comprised of planes or polygons and are stored as hierarchical structures within an object list.