4D superhero

Last weekend I spent some time with Marc Ten Bosch, and got to see him demo his 4D game Miegakure several times. It’s a wonderful game, with a simple premise: Your character lives in a four dimensional world — one vertical dimension plus three horizontal dimensions.

At any given time you can see only two of the three horizontal dimensions. However, you can rotate between two of those dimensions at will.

So you are always within some three dimensional “slice” of the game’s 4D world. But because you can rotate that slice, you have tremendous freedom of motion within the full four dimensional space.

Today, thinking back on the game, I thought that it might be fun to make a movie where the hero has a similar ability. Even in our plain-old 3D world, this would be an interesting superpower to have.

After all, if I rotate my 3D body so that part of me sticks out into a fourth dimension, then I can make myself perfectly flat within our own world — like an infinitely thin piece of paper.

This would give me the superpower of sliding between cracks, or fitting into impossibly thin places. For example, I could hide behind a bookshelf, or slip through a sliding door.

It might be fun to frame each shot so that the character with these superpowers is always fully dimensional to the audience, becoming “thinner” only in the dimension perpendicular to the screen — the one that we cannot see.

That would allow us to share our hero’s point of view. It would also mean that all the special effects could be done through simple image compositing.

Now all we need is a good script…

One thought on “4D superhero”

  1. it reminds me all the fantasies in “Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions” written over a century ago. Also “The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art” gives a devastating investigation from Flatland, Duchamp to Russian Avant-garde. Great read, thanks.

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