Introducing: **Coxels**!

Now why are you laughing like that? It must be completely obvious from the name that I am talking about ‘Code Voxels‘

Voxels?

Ah yes… Ok, lets start at the beginning… You know pixels, right?

Pfew, ok we have some foundation. So just like a pixel is a small enclosed region of screen space, a voxel is a small enclosed volume of space. A Volumetric pixel. And, when you think about it, a pixel is a voxel, but specifically for 2D (where volume=area), and generally when people talk about voxels, they think of a 3D volume.

However the concept generalises across dimensions. A 4d voxel is the exact same concept, just with an extra dimension. And you could keep going up. But what about down? Can you go down from a 2D pixel? Well… it depends on how many dimensions a 2D pixel has, in your opinion. Mathematicians may point out that technically, a point has no dimensionality at all! Or, one might argue, that an infinitely small point has infinite dimensions.. who knows… Anyway, forgive my rambling, where were we?

Oh yes. Coxels.

Stop giggling. I am serious here, ok!

So what are Coxels?

What if you were to combine the concept of cells enclosing some volume, with the idea of code that operates purely on cells? That executes simple rules based only on the state of its own and its neighbor’s cells. Having access only to the previous and current state of these cells and deterministically operating on that to transition its own current state to its new next state? Such systems exist. They are called cellular automata and they operate on cells. The rules that determine the state transitions are usually hard-coded into such systems. A famous example is famous Mathematician John Conway’s Game of Life

But, what if we would allow the cells to execute generic instruction streams? What if, in other words, we would create generic volumetric programmable deterministic automaton cells? That would be super cool! And way too long a name, hence: Coxels.

Play with your Coxels

What? I am talking about Moebius VM. What else?

I am building this thing. This multi-dimensional-volumetric deterministic cell-state-transitioning-machine processing instruction streams to animate a multi-dimensional world filled with coxels. Or something. I am not sure yet what this will be, but if my suspicions are correct… It will Rock! 😎

Follow for updates. Leave a comment if you like coxels.