My problem is that Escher did so many DIFFERENT effects, that I don't
think you could have one standard "Escher engine." Maybe a "stairs
that always go up but never get higher engine" or such. He just
generally plays so many tricks on the viewer, based on assumptions
people make when looking at a print. For example, the waterfall effect
is based on the facts that a) we know water always flows down hill, b)
things further back in a scene will tend to move "up" the page. If one
were to translate this into 3d, it would lose one of these
effects. Can an engine be constructed such that if one were to walk to
the back of the waterfall structure, the illusion wouldn't be
shattered? This would rely upon being able to create the tricks of
perspective and assumptions about the real world for any possible
position of the viewer.
"Andrew C. Esh" <andrewes@cnt.com>:
> Extrapolating that into 3D would be a problem for many of those
> effects, though. The human vision system hasn't changed, so relying
> on it to suddenly be able to see four or five dimensions in order to
> produce a 3D illusion will not work.
andyn@texas.net (Andy Norris):
> Tell me what you're thinking of with 4D worlds. It's interesting
> conceptually, but I'm not sure what it means in practical--or, for
> that matter, even visual--terms.
This is a mathematical thing, really - stuff like tesseracts and other
4d objects should be representable in a VR space. The trick isn't that
we'd need to see differently, but that we'd experience something
different. As one walks through a tesseract (or hypercube) one does
not move as expected, due to possible motion along a 4th dimension. I
think representations of tesseracts have already been done in VR,
actually. But it is these and other tricks you can play when you have
the degree of control over reality possible with VR. The walk one way
aroud the piller to go to room a, the other way to go to room b
effects, Tardis effects (the Tardis is, I believe, based on a
tesseract), etc can be seen as permutations of 4spacial motion...
Ray