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The MojoWorld™
Parallel Universe
Now for the hard part: explaining what
exactly MojoWorld is. MojoWorld has been
designed first and foremost to be fun & intriguing. It has also been carefully
designed to be an easy-to-use software tool for graphic arts,
fine art, digital effects and digital movie making. But it's much, much more than
that.
MojoWorld is literally a window
looking into a parallel universe. What you see in MojoWorld
exists in the timeless truth of mathematical logic.
It is eternal; it has always existed, and always will. Other intelligent beings in
other parts of our universe may already be exploring this
eternal beauty; perhaps they did it billions of years ago.
Because MojoWorld is entirely procedural—creating
virtually everything on the fly, rather than loading it from
disk or getting it from an input device like a mouse or tablet—all
MojoWorld images represent mathematical theorems proved
inside your computer.
Okay, that's heady stuff, and not at
all necessary to your enjoyment of MojoWorlds. It's arcane enough that Doc
Mojo got a PhD from Yale for it, so don't worry if you don't
completely understand it all.
8-) But it has
some very interesting implications, so please bear with us
while we explain a little further:
We call the parallel universe that
MojoWorld accesses Parametric Hyperspace. That's not just a cool name,
it's also very accurate. "Parametric"
means that it is defined by the values that the MojoWorld
user interface controls: ordinary things like color, position
and shape, as well as esoteric things like fractal dimension.
Inside the computer, these things are all just numbers.
We call those numbers "parameters."
It's a "hyperspace" because it has more than the three
dimensions we are familiar with in daily life. MojoWorld has those
three familiar spatial dimensions, plus time. But it also has many other,
higher dimensions—one for each parameter, in fact.
Here's the easiest way to think of
it: each parameter represents a degree of freedom;
an axis you can move back and forth along, as you change the
parameter's value. So,
for instance, specifying a color in MojoWorld adds
three higher dimensions: one for each of the red, green and
blue values you use to specify the color. Each of these axes corresponds
to a higher dimension in Parametric Hyperspace: it's just
a different direction you can move in. You can see that, in getting
all the settings right for a scene, you've set a lot of parameters,
and thus traveled in many dimensions of Parametric Hyperspace.
Any given MojoWorld corresponds to
a point in Parametric Hyperspace. A pure MojoWorld scene
file, without added content such as plants, buildings, etc.
is just the set of numbers that specify that point in Parametric
Hyperspace. That point
specifies an entire planet, with unlimited detail.
We call that information, quite accurately, Transporter
Coordinates. MojoWorld loads those
Transporter Coordinates and "beams" you to that location in
Parametric Hyperspace. You're
then free to explore both the planet you've been Transported
to, and the subspace of Parametric Hyperspace spanned by the
Hyperspace Axis sliders in the Hyperspace Mixer.
MojoWorld Transporter™ gives you all this
for free. MojoWorld Generator™
provides this plus full access to all of Parametric
Hyperspace, all several million dimensions of it.
Okay, enough pointy-headed talk. >;-) What it all means, bottom
line, is that MojoWorld scene files are incredibly
tiny, because they only need to contain the Transporter Coordinates
that specify a point in Parametric Hyperspace—a relatively
small set of numbers. Nevertheless the place that
MojoWorld beams you to has unlimited detail. It's all generated on the
fly. So MojoWorld
sports near-perfect scene compression. Sure, it's arcane, but it's
the perfect way to build cyberspace. And that's what MojoWorld
is building toward.
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