PEOPLE, IDEAS & MATERIALS
Behind the Weave.
Creator
Created by Oana Rinaldi, whose practice connects art, architecture and algorithms.
Art & sound
The game combines original fantasy architecture, generated realm illustrations and icon artwork, a character based on MakeHuman assets, and CC0 environmental materials and models from Poly Haven. Its ambient soundscapes and interactive cues are synthesized in the game.
Foundations & further reading
Miegakure, by Marc ten Bosch is an inspiration for exploring a four-dimensional world through three-dimensional slices. Aetherfold is an independent project and is not affiliated with Miegakure.
N-Dimensional Rigid Body Dynamics, Marc ten Bosch, ACM Transactions on Graphics (2020), provides further context on higher-dimensional simulation. Aetherfold uses a simpler custom movement and collision system, not that paper’s full dynamics solver.
Further reading on four-dimensional rotations and hyperplane sections accompany the project’s research notes.
About this website
The large hero and realm images are AI-enhanced promotional artwork created with ChatGPT from in-engine photographs. They retain the game’s recognizable architecture and viewpoints while enriching surface details, lighting and fantasy atmosphere. They are artistic interpretations, not screenshots of the game’s rendering or a first-person gameplay mode. Every chamber thumbnail is a separate frame from that chamber’s actual desktop walkthrough. Video panels show actual desktop gameplay. The campaign contains 136 chambers built from a set of recurring puzzle structures with different quests, geometry, and realm treatments.