Archive for May, 2020

SIGGRAPH 2020 Technical Paper: N-Dimensional Rigid Body Dynamics

Thursday, May 7th, 2020

Excited to announce that my technical paper “N-Dimensional Rigid Body Dynamics” was accepted to SIGGRAPH 2020! Very proud to present research developed for 4D Toys & Miegakure at such a prestigious conference.

Here is the link to the paper and the abstract:

I present a formulation for Rigid Body Dynamics that is independent of the dimension of the space. I describe the state and equations of motion of rigid bodies using geometric algebra. Using collision detection algorithms extended to nD I resolve collisions and contact between bodies. My implementation is 4D, but the techniques described here apply to any number of dimensions. I display these four-dimensional rigid bodies by taking a three-dimensional slice through them. I allow the user to manipulate these bodies in real-time.

Btw I believe it is basically unheard of to have work from an indie game presented in the SIGGRAPH technical papers track?

The paper is full of really fun and beautiful math (obviously Geometric Algebra based, see my recent article) that makes me happy. One reviewer called the work “whimsical,” and they’re not wrong, ahah.

Most of this work (including writing the paper) is from ~2012, but I added a section on the (4D) Dzhanibekov effect at the suggestion of the reviewers. Many thanks to them for helping me greatly improve the paper.