Spatial Orientation — User Manual

Turn a shape in your head, then check whether you were right.

Every engineering drawing assumes you can look at three flat views and see the solid they describe. Almost nothing teaches that skill directly — you are expected to arrive with it. This is a place to practise it, free and with no account.

aicoevolution.com/spatial

The one idea

A lateral view is not a camera angle. It is a projection along an axis.

When you look at a solid "from the front", you are not photographing it — you are flattening it along one axis, so depth disappears and every block at the same height and width lands on the same square. Two different solids can share a front view. That is exactly why engineers draw three.

Every drawing in this app is computed from the solid beside it, hidden lines and all. Nothing is hand-drawn, so nothing can quietly disagree with the object it claims to describe.

The three modes

They are worth meeting in this order.

Explore

Turn a solid and watch its drawing follow.

• Drag the object to orbit it.
• Scroll to zoom.
• Press a named view — Front, Top, Right and the rest — to snap to it exactly.
• Iso returns you to the corner view.

There is an honesty rule built into this mode: anything you reach by dragging is a real projection, but it is not a standard view, and the panel says so rather than letting you believe you are looking at a Front view when you are three degrees off it.

Missing view

Two views of one solid are given; pick the third from the drawings offered.

Every wrong answer is a real projection of a real object — the same solid with one block moved. Rejecting a wrong answer therefore teaches you something, which is not true of a distractor invented at random.

Show the solid is available whenever you want it. It gives the answer away, which is why it is your button and not something the app does for you. Next question deals a new one.

Build it

Three views given; build the solid out of unit blocks.

You work a layer at a time, and z = 0 is the ground. Each layer is a plan drawn exactly like the from above view — x to the right, y up — so the thing you are drawing on and the thing you are reading from are the same shape.

Click a cell to place or remove a block, then Check. Clear starts the stack again.

The controls that apply everywhere

Hidden lines on / off. The dashed edges an engineer draws for what is behind the surface. They are off by default while you orbit, because they have to be recomputed for every direction you look from. Turn them on when you want to read a drawing rather than spin it.

Axes. Shows which way x, y and z run. This app is Z-up, matching Blender and CAD rather than the web's usual Y-up — if you are coming from three.js, that is the difference to hold in mind.

The palette. The light you are working in. It changes nothing about the geometry.

The ? in the header brings back the welcome guide at any time.

SOP — the notation underneath

The app has a text notation for solids and their views, called the Spatial Orientation Protocol. You do not need it to use the app, and most people never will. It exists because a text form is checkable, and because it lets a language model navigate a 3D model the way a score can be navigated as text.

The form is three slots, always in x y z order:

s0(0-1)2
 │  │  │
 x  y  z      the slot in brackets is a RUN

s000          one block
s00(0-2)      three blocks stacked up
s(0-2)00      three blocks in a row along x
s2,3,1        the comma form, once a coordinate reaches two digits

A file opens with a header line — Solid 4x4x4 — and blank lines and # comments are ignored. An unlisted column is empty: the notation records what is there, not a grid of what is not.

The rule that makes it useful: the model never writes the geometry — it writes SOP, and code compiles it or refuses it with a line number. A mistake comes back diagnosed, in the same text that produced it.

Full specification: domains/spatial/SOP_STANDARD.md in the repository, with 61 assertions covering it.

Honest limits

• No assistant, deliberately. There is no chat in this app. The platform is moving toward one assistant that knows every app rather than a separate one bolted onto each; until that exists, this app stays quiet.
• Solids are lattice solids — unit blocks on a grid. That is enough for the skill this teaches and keeps every view exactly computable. It is not a CAD package and does not pretend to be.
• No account, no progress tracking. Nothing is saved. You come, you practise, you leave. If saved progress would be useful to you, say so.

For teachers

This is free and needs no account, so a class can use it without any administrative step at all. The skill it drills — reading three orthographic views and reconstructing the object — is the one every technical drawing course assumes on day one.

Missing view works well as a warm-up because it is fast and self-marking. Build it is the harder one and rewards being done on paper first, then checked here.