Can Holograms Reform Mathematical Education As We Know It?

Regardless of the angle you approach it from, sometimes math is just hard. Even with a visualization tool like a SMART Board, students can still struggle with topics like geometry, where emphasis is placed on the position of figures and the properties of space. A holographic display is the key to not only visualizing difficult concepts in 3D, but also exhibiting them in an engaging medium.

A few weeks ago Nolan, one of our Unity Developers, built a tesseract in Unity and ported it into his Looking Glass as a part of our internal hackathon. A tesseract, also known as a hypercube, is a four-dimensional object that appears to us third-dimensional dwellers as a cube-like space bounded by cubes.

We won’t get too deep into the four-dimensional weeds here, largely because it’s a highly abstract concept that is much better conveyed as a hologram than as a blog post. What we will say, is that displaying a tesseract in a Looking Glass makes conceptualizing the fourth dimension much easier than drawing it out on a 2D whiteboard, given that it is explained using 3D objects.

“It’s not necessarily something that couldn’t be rendered in a 2D space, it’s just super hard. It was interesting for me to try to represent a 4D object in a 3D space, which is something that a volumetric display is uniquely good at.”

Being largely theoretical, the fourth dimension isn’t something we can easily visualize. That is, unless you’ve got a Looking Glass, in which case it’s only one dimension away.

The notion that a highly abstract concept, such as the fourth dimension, can be made accessible to students in a comprehensive and engaging way is more than powerful. It makes us reevaluate the ways in which we deliver conceptually challenging material.

If you're an educator who is interested in learning more about how the Looking Glass can be used in your classroom, don’t raise your hand, send us a message at future@lookingglassfactory.com