A four-dimensional building-block puzzle in VR, for Meta Quest.
Found a bug or have a suggestion? Open an issue on GitHub (free account required). Please include the version shown on the game's About page.
Stereoscopic videos & photos — real 3D in a VR headset (Meta Quest), flat 2D preview everywhere else.
Think of the Soma cube: a few pieces made of small cubes that assemble into a larger shape. Tesserian is that, one dimension up. The pieces are built from tesseracts — four-dimensional cubes — and you move and turn them in genuine four-dimensional space until they fit the goal shape. You look at that space from inside a VR headset: the fourth coordinate is folded into what you see, and after a while you stop translating and simply see it (in the best case 🙂).
Tesserian is actually the successor of 4D Building Blocks (2006), which delivered the third dimension through red/cyan anaglyph glasses or the magic-eye trick at a time where Virtual Reality simply did not exist. VR finally gives the stereo depth for free, with the head doing the looking around — so the whole thing could be rebuilt around that. Tesserian looks nothing like its ancestor, but its 4D geometry descends directly from the old code.
The game does not fake its picture. Hidden-surface removal is computed in four dimensions: for every frame the game works out exactly which parts of a piece are hidden behind other pieces in 4D, and only what is visible from your 4D viewpoint is drawn. What reaches your eyes is that visible surface, projected into the three dimensions of your play space and rendered as glass — see-through, so nothing inside a shape is ever lost. Colour and a few further cues encode the fourth coordinate, so depth in the fourth direction reads as naturally as depth in the third.
Solving levels earns points, and points unlock exhibits in the Polychoron Watch: the 47 non-prismatic convex uniform polychora, the four-dimensional counterpart of the 13 Archimedean solids. They rotate in front of you giving nearly a meditative experience. The tesseract and the 24-cell are among them, up to shapes with thousands of cells, consecutively unlocked with your (hard) earned points. Their short names follow the convention of Jonathan Bowers.
I have dear memories about the Higher Dimensions forum, where people build 4D things for the joy of it. Special thanks to quickfur — One of the best visualization guides and endless patient explanations, especially also on the Uniform Polychora which are the rewards in Tesserian.