Freya Holmér, a veteran in the games industry, discusses her passion for math and making it accessible through visualizations. Topics include math for game development, radians, low persistence in VR, motion blur, cross product, and mathematical art.
Visualizing math helps make complex concepts accessible and engaging for students.
Animations and VR can aid in understanding abstract mathematical concepts and overcome challenges in visualizing time.
Deep dives
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The Power of Math Visualizations in Education
Freya Holler, an expert in math visualizations, discusses the impact of using visualizations to explain complex mathematical concepts. She highlights the value of visualizing mathematical systems to identify and debug issues. Freya emphasizes that sharing these visualizations helps people understand the underlying data and patterns, making math more accessible and engaging. She notes the importance of presenting math in a visually appealing way, as traditional methods can make the subject seem boring or daunting to students.
The Challenge of Visualizing Time in Math
Freya and Scott Hanselman explore the difficulty of visualizing time in mathematical concepts, particularly for children. They discuss the abstract nature of representing time on a two-dimensional medium and the challenges it poses for comprehension. Freya emphasizes the value of animations in overcoming this challenge and providing a visual representation of how mathematical concepts evolve over time. They also touch upon techniques used in virtual reality (VR) to address the vestibular mismatch, which can cause motion sickness.
The Role of Unity and Tools in Math Animations
Freya explains her process of creating math animations using Unity, a game development platform. She shares her experience developing a tool for capturing footage inside Unity to create smooth animations. By employing a motion blur technique and rendering frames offline, she achieves visually appealing and accurate representations. Freya also discusses her approach of treating math animations as interactive video game experiences, integrating her knowledge of game development to enhance the educational content.
Freya Holmér makes educational math visualizations, does live game development on Twitch, as well as creates videos and Unity tools! She's been in the games industry for 10 years, working on things like Shader Forge, a node-based shader editor for Unity, and Budget Cuts, a VR stealth game made at Neat Corp. She talks to Scott about her love of math and making math accessible using a number of custom visualization tools.