high-dimensional viewer, by projecting onto a 3d hypercube. Use the mouse to rotate the 3d projection hypercube.
This doesnt really work as well as I hoped it would.
The concept is:
- project onto 3d hypercube/plane
- can rotate the 3d projection freely, to view it from any angle (simply drag the mouse, with or without ctrl key, to do this; pressing ctrl key changes the left-right drag axis)
- can use
wkey to change the rotation axes, into a hyper-axis; and then drag the mouse, to drag around in hyperspace
This sort of works. But I dont find being able to drag around in 4 dimensions as useful as I thought I would...
Anyway, this is what I have for now.
I looked at the following earlier projects before writing this:
- hypertools https://github.com/ContextLab/hypertools Seems nice. Python, matplotlib. Projection from hyperspace into 3 dimensions, using SVD
- https://github.com/mikasarkinjain/hyperdimensional-data-visualization Written in 'Processing' language. Shows 3 dimensions in the viewer, and 3 additional dimensions via red/green/blue shading.
Hypertools seems cool. I wanted a bit more flexibility to customize how one drags around the viewport, the UI etc. And hypertools seems to fix the projection plane to the results of SVD essentially? Sarkin-Jain's project sounds similar to what I'm trying here. The main reason I didnt consider using it directly is because I wanted something written in Python ideally. I also looked briefly at how https://github.com/facebook/UETorch is implemented, or at least, what engine they are using. They are using Unreal engine. I think that's overkill for what I have/had in mind :-P
In other news, I think Pyglet, which I'm using here, works quite well for what I want/wanted:
- handles key presses with almost no effort, and mouse drags
- opengl, of course
- (and the opengl wrapping works pretty nicely, no major 'ow!' points or anything)
- didnt take much effort to put a 2d hud on it