Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

The properties of euclidean space seem natural and obvious to us, to thepoint that it took mathematicians over two thousand years to see analternative to Euclid’s parallel postulate. The eventual discovery ofhyperbolic geometry in the 19th century shook our assumptions, revealingjust how strongly our native experience of the world blinded us fromconsistent alternatives, even in a field that many see as purelytheoretical. Non-euclidean spaces are still seen as unintuitive and exotic,but with direct immersive experiences we can get a better intuitive feel forthem. The latest wave of virtual reality hardware, in particular the HTCVive, tracks both the orientation and the position of the headset within aroom-sized volume, allowing for such an experience. We use this nacenttechnology to explore the three-dimensional geometries of theThurston/Perelman geometrization theorem. This talk focuses on oursimulations of H³ and H²×E.