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Comment by chairmanwow1 | Hacker News Reader

There’s another game being developed in a semi-3D hyperbolic geometry called Hyperbolica. The dev makes some fantastic videos [1].

[1] https://youtu.be/yY9GAyJtuJ0

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Ha! the title of that video "Spherical Geometry Is Stranger Than Hyperbolic" is very insightful. Due to the convergence of the light rays on positive curvature, objects appear larger the further they are! Hyperbolic geometry is like euclidean with a spacious horizon. But spherical geometry is a wickedly different thing. All your "sky" is covered by the single point at your antipodes (when it's not occluded by a tiny object very far away from you).

I'm at a standing desk on a balance board and I had to get off. I got disorientated and nauseous just watching that. I can't even imagine spherical geometry with VR.

As much as I enjoy excursions in hyperbolic spaces, I also find it causes awful motion sickness. Even in 2D, it can be a bit much.

How much have you played? It seems you need to get used to it -- for me it caused motion sickness initially, but after getting used to it (which did not require much playing in my case), not anymore (except with experimenting with new graphical settings). I still get motion sickness in Euclidean 3D games. Changing the options could help too.

I expect that's true. I got very strong motion sickness with VR, but after dedicating a few hours to it I can do low-motion games fine.

Mostly I've managed to make myself slightly ill with my own experiments in rendering motion in hyperbolic space, so I haven't spent too long in HyperRogue.

Well, if we see an object with our eye, we know that it is on a particular line. When the brain sees the object with two eyes, it knows that the object is where the two lines cross.

As long as they cross in front of the eyes. If they cross in the back, the math works, but the brain is not trained for it.

In spherical geometry that happens -- you see things which are just behind you, but the brain has problems interpreting that.

Simulating binocular vision is not the only approach though -- you can use a perspective where the objects appear at the correct distances, some non-Euclidean VR games do this.

Also see here https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMgVKCsG_7z1jpdHDR_TwUw for development of HyperBlock, a hyperbolic Minecraft.

I was just about to link to code parade! He's done suck amazing things with real time rendering and perspective, it's great

HyperRogue has 3D modes with real-time rendering and perspective too. (And playable, not just videos ;)

Perceptually, it's interesting that in the "2D" hyperbolic plane, the game map tests the limits of the human mind. But in "3D" this becomes virtually impossible. Even with practice it becomes intractable for the typical player to imagine "spaces expanding within spaces" at 60fps!

The effect looks like lensing

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