Designing Real-Time Software Advisors for 3D Spatial Operations

The ability to reason about polyhedral forms is arguably an important element of spatial (and more broadly mathematical) visualization. This paper describes our progress toward creating real-time software "advisors" whose goal is to enhance this type of spatial reasoning. Our advisors are procedures built to augment a program named HyperGami (an educational application for the creation of paper polyhedral models and sculptures). The advisors can, in certain cases, suggest interesting spatial operations to perform on HyperGami solids; when performed, these operations will create new polyhedral variants. This paper briefly describes the HyperGami system; discusses what, in our view, it might mean to think creatively or powerfully about solid shapes; and presents our current set of advisors.