Inspiration
We're all interested in virtual reality and mathematics, and the behaviour of 2d automata (such as game of life) can be understood much easier if you are able to see each of the previous states - a very intuitive way to do this would be to use time as an axis and display it in 3d.
What it does
It showcases 4 examples of cellular automata, some of which are well known, and some we made ourselves!
How we built it
We divided the workload into parallelizable objectives that effectively utilizes each of our strengths. George and Caleb are experienced with mathematics, so they worked on the algorithms to generate the automata; Sol is experienced with VR and programming, so he implemented the functions to initialize the VR environment and turn the arrays into the physical automata; and Artemis is experienced with modelling and hardware, so they helped set up the headset and designed the museum itself.
Challenges we ran into
We had some problems with hardware interfacing and networking at the start, which we overcame with persistence and creative thinking. Some of were programming in a language we had never used before, which was a challenge, which we overcame through effective communication skills and teamwork. Finally, we had only one desktop to work with for the first few hours, which meant there was a bottleneck in terms of how many people can be programming, which we effectively overcame by using this time to plan, discuss ideas and algorithms, and write some of the functions in pseudocode.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We ended up with a really cool product that effectively shows that VR can be effectively used in scientific and mathematical fields, and we discovered some emergent properties from the automata that we almost surely wouldn't have been able to if we had no way of rendering them in 3D.
What we learned
We learned how to program stuff in VR and how to effectively work as a team in high pressure time sensitive environment.
What's next for Musium of Auto-Cubeism
We planned on making more automata, and possible refining the rendering so that we can render even larger spaces (and possibly even infinite!)
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