https://ciechanow.ski/lights-and-shadows/
https://ciechanow.ski/tesseract/
Etc.
Check out the whole blog! It's amazing.
These are some of the most intuitive explanations coupled with the slickest animation / demo work I've ever seen. All of that put together into crystal clear educational material is such a rare gem and requires incredible talent.
Impressive as hell.
I hope someone is paying them to do this full time. I'd pay for this.
> I find it very inspiring that while we can’t physically experience a four dimensional space, with just a bit of ingenuity we can easily simulate how a tesseract and its shadow would look in our day-to-day world.
> You may find math’s indifference to the limitations of our human perception quite cruel, but I think it’s liberating. Reflecting on higher dimensions is transcendent – it removes the shackles of the physical world and allows us to explore the realms we’ll never encounter.
I'd highly recommend it to anyone who is seriously interested in the underlying 'mechanics' of imaging.
(Incidentally, anyone whose has read my many anti-JavaScript raves, then I'd only say this is exactly how JavaScript ought to be used.)
My one minor nit-pick would be introducing the wave nature of light so early--to motivate Snell's law and total internal reflection, but without discussing diffraction until well later and only in passing.
Snell's law can be motivated from a purely classical particle-based model as:
1. Light travels slower through media other than vacuum (This is mentioned, but hand-waved as boundary conditions, which probably isn't meaningful to the intended audience). 2. Light takes the shortest (in time) path between two points. (Light... finds a way).
Either way, the audience might find the obvious "why" for the first point more satisfactorily addressed with a short sidebar on permittivity and permeability of materials (their electrical properties, effectively the capacitance and inductance "density").
That can also lead to an interesting discussion of why conductors are usually not optically transparent and insulators are.
It just needs a diagram showing the waves refracting, and the geometry of the wave fronts. (Pretty annoying that they never explained refraction like that in school either - Snell's law was just a given when it's actually really trivial to derive from first principles.)