Tesseract Screensaver
The Tesseract screensaver rotates a four-dimensional cube in two independent planes at once and projects it into three dimensions, then onto your screen. It runs in the browser with nothing to install; press ESC to exit.
How the Tesseract screensaver works
The saver renders with three.js on your GPU. The library is vendored into this site rather than fetched from a CDN, and loads only when a 3D screensaver actually runs.
It reads nothing external — the sixteen vertices and thirty-two edges are generated in the browser.
The scene resizes with the window and releases its WebGL context when the saver stops, so shuffle mode and Multi-view can cycle 3D savers without exhausting the browser's context limit.
If WebGL is unavailable the saver says so on screen rather than showing an empty black box.
A worked example
The sixteen vertices are every combination of plus and minus one in four coordinates, and an edge joins any two differing in exactly one — thirty-two of them. Rotation happens in the xw and yz planes simultaneously, then the point is projected from 4D to 3D by dividing by its distance along the fourth axis, exactly as a 3D scene is projected onto a flat screen. Colour tracks position on that unseen axis, since the eye has no other cue for it.
Settings & tips
- Accent and Background recolour the scene; Speed changes the pace of the motion and the camera.
- Add it to a Multi-view grid, though 3D savers are heavier than 2D ones and a few per screen is plenty.
- Press ESC at any time to leave fullscreen.
Frequently asked questions
- Why does the inner cube turn inside out?
- It does not. Nothing is stretching or passing through anything. Parts of the object are simply moving further away along an axis we cannot perceive, and the perspective division makes them appear to shrink and pass through the rest.
- Is a tesseract a real object?
- It is a real mathematical object, defined as precisely as a cube, but it cannot exist in three-dimensional space. What you see is a shadow of it — the same way a cube casts a two-dimensional shadow.
- Does this need a special browser or plugin?
- No. It uses WebGL, which every current desktop and mobile browser supports. Nothing is installed and no plugin is required.
- Does it cost anything or need an account?
- No. Every screensaver here is free, runs in the browser and needs no sign-up.