Model Room

About this app

Some shapes survive being drawn flat. Most of the interesting ones don't. Model Room is a collection of mathematical curves and molecular structures rendered at true scale in a volume you can walk around. Nineteenth-century universities kept rooms like this: shelves of plaster surfaces beside ball-and-stick models, because some things only make sense once you can step around them. Eighty-nine entries, in two galleries. MATHEMATICS Thirty-nine space curves inside a coordinate box, each casting a dotted shadow onto all three walls. Viviani's curve makes the case on its own: one curve, whose three shadows are a circle, a parabola and a figure-eight. No single flat drawing can hold that. Knots that cannot be untied, and one that looks knotted but isn't. Spirals that grow geometrically beside spirals that grow linearly. Rolling-wheel curves lifted out of the plane. Lissajous figures at frequencies that never fall back into step. CHEMISTRY Fifty structures in ball-and-stick, in the CPK colours chemists read without thinking, turnable in your hands. Methane's real 109.47° tetrahedron, which a flat cross drawing makes look like 90°. Cyclohexane in both chair and boat — the same molecule, two shapes, and the reason 3D matters. Diamond and graphite side by side: identical atoms, opposite properties, entirely because of arrangement. Cisplatin next to transplatin, same formula and same bonds, one a cancer drug and one inert. Aspirin, penicillin G and V, and amoxicillin. One added oxygen turns an injected antibiotic into a tablet, and you can see exactly where it sits. EVERY GEOMETRY IS SOURCED Bond lengths and angles come from published experimental structures, or are derived from symmetry where symmetry determines them. Nothing is sketched by eye. Each entry names where its geometry came from, because a model with invented bond angles teaches something false. WRITTEN TO BE READ Every entry has a short explanation of what you are looking at and why it is worth looking at — what the shape causes, or disproves, or what a flat picture gets wrong about it. Alongside it: the formula, the measured values, and a colour key for the elements on screen. DESIGNED FOR THE HEADSET The coordinate box is the window itself, aligned to its faces rather than tilted to a chosen camera angle — you change the view by moving, as you would around an object on a table. Molecules turn with a drag. The catalogue is searchable and grouped, and the panels sit where they do not intersect the geometry. WHAT'S INCLUDED Twenty-seven entries are free, spread across every category, so nothing is a locked wall. One purchase unlocks the rest permanently — no subscription, and future additions are included.

Momentum comes from crawler snapshots for the tracked storefront. “Viral growth signal” means unusually fast recent rating gains; it is an indicator, not download data.

1. First observed Aug 20, 2026 · 10:56 PM Free