TANGENTIDE the wayfinder’s sphere
A LITTLE JOURNEY IN CURVED SPACE

Take the long way.
Come back changed.

Carry your compass around a porcelain world. Collect the lights, then arrive with the right heading.

POSTCARD 01 / 080 / 5 hops

GPT-painted porcelain globe
collect lightdestination··· far-side route
A SMALL TWIST

Same place. Different heading.

Your compass is carried along the sphere without being twisted by hand. On a curved world, a loop can rotate it. That change is called holonomy.

  1. Choose a neighboring station on the globe or one of the four route cards.
  2. Visit every golden light. Then reach the coral destination with its requested needle.
  3. Each dial uses its own station’s local frame: the current station on the left, the destination on the right. Route cards preview your next heading.

First postcard: try Beryl → Coral → Aster. The globe curves under your compass, and the needle returns turned by a quarter turn.

Dashed routes go around the far side. Copper crosses are closed routes. Stations are always clickable from the route cards.

Keyboard: 1–4 choose a route, U undo, R restart, H nudge. Every level is open. Hints show a shortest finishing hop when one exists.

Research & open-source notes

Original MIT game, inspired by recent geometric-phase research: Geometric phases and holonomy in structured optical fields—a tutorial, Journal of Optics 28 (2026), published 2 November 2026. This is a classical sphere puzzle, not an optical or quantum simulator.

The spherical transport formula is adapted from geomstats/geomstats, MIT, HypersphereMetric.parallel_transport. The Python research library is a mathematical source, not an upstream browser game. Original puzzles, interface and gameplay; locally bundled GPT-generated globe and compass artwork.

Full provenance: metadata.json and LICENSE.txt in this static bundle.