New World Notes: -- AND HE REZZED A CROOKED HOUSE
In Robert A. Heinlein's classic short story, “—And He Built a Crooked House”, a cheerfully deranged architect builds a Los Angeles home shaped like a tesseract, a four dimensional hypercube. His idea is to invent a revolutionary new building that'll save space (after all, if a home exists in four dimensions, you get a lot more square footage to work with), but an earthquake shifts the house into still another dimension. And then things start to get strange from there.
Things get odd in the crooked house of Seifert Surface, located hundreds of meters up above an island called, appropriately enough, The Future. But it doesn't require an earthquake. To enter the hyper-dimensionality of Seifert’s home, all that’s necessary is to push the big button on the marble table in the foyer.
... it does, however, require a virtual reality. The article goes on to explain how a Stanford math student programmed the house in the online roleplaying game Second Life. Apparently it's done by moving rooms around, and only works right for only one user at a time. It would be interesting to speculate on just what kind of game software would be required to allow this sort of thing to be done right. R'lyeh, anyone? But that way madness lies.
(from Boing Boing)
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