cyberspace← Learn · dataspace
The Earth plane
Cyberspace is a cube, 285 positions on each side, and there are two copies of it. The last bit of every coordinate, the plane bit, says which copy a point is in (section 2.4). Plane 0 is dataspace, the copy laid over the physical world. Plane 1 is ideaspace, the same cube with no physical meaning at all. Both copies share the same X, Y and Z, and moving, hiding and finding work identically in each.
This scene is about dataspace, and the one thing that makes it special: the specification puts Earth in it. Earth's center sits at 284 on every axis, the exact middle of the cube. The scale is fixed by one choice: height 34 is a human-scale area of 2 meters, meaning an aligned cube 234 positions wide is 2 meters wide. That makes one position, one Gibson, about the width of a hydrogen atom, and one kilometer 1000 × 233 Gibsons.
The scene draws those constants to scale: Earth, geosynchronous orbit, and the aligned cubes that meet at Earth's center. The dots on the surface are the six reference points of section 9.8, known places whose exact coordinates the spec lists as required test vectors for every implementation, decoded from their hex and placed.
The mapping
The canonical algorithm (section 9.7) takes a latitude, a longitude and an altitude, converts them to Earth-centered coordinates in kilometers with deterministic decimal arithmetic, and then applies one formula per axis: u = km × 1000 × 2^33 + 2^84, rounded half-even and clamped to the axis. The constant comes from the scale: 234 Gibsons is 2 meters, so a Gibson is 2-33 meters and a kilometer is 1000 × 233 of them (section 9.2). The axes are renamed on the way in (section 9.4): +X points at latitude 0, longitude 0; +Y is north; +Z points at longitude +90.
The scene runs none of the trigonometry. It takes the six golden vectors of section 9.8, the hex strings every implementation must reproduce, decodes each one with the bit layout of section 2.2, subtracts 284 and divides by the constant. What you see on the globe is the consensus lock itself, placed: the prime meridian point lands 6,378.137 km along +X, which is the WGS84 equatorial radius, and the north pole lands 6,356.752 km up +Y, the polar radius.
Eight cubes meet at the center
284 is a multiple of 2h for every height up to 84, so Earth's center is a corner of the aligned cube at every height below the whole axis, never inside one. A planet-sized region is therefore always eight regions, one per octant, which is why section 9.3 prices "an Earth octant" at height 57 and "the GEO cube" at height 60. Move the slider and the eight cubes grow through the planet: at height 56 a single cube first reaches past Earth's radius, at height 59 past geosynchronous orbit.
The same fact has a sharp edge. The three planes X = 284, Y = 284 and Z = 284 are boundaries of height 85: a one-meter step across the equator, or across the prime meridian, costs the same work as crossing the entire axis (the note under section 9.7). They behave like oceans, uncrossable on foot and crossed routinely through hyperspace (DECK-0001), whose landfalls sit on both shores. The yellow planes in the scene are those three boundaries.
The scale ladder
Every height the specification names, from one Gibson to the axis. The side is 2h Gibsons at the Height 34 scale; the root is the exact 85 × 2h bits per axis of section 9.9, in decimal units as section 6.1 states them.
| Height | Side | Root per axis | The specification calls it |
|---|---|---|---|
| h0 | 116 pm | 11 bytes | one Gibson: atomic precision (section 7.3) |
| h10 | 119 nm | 10.9 KB | microscopic (section 7.3) |
| h20 | 122 μm | 11.1 MB | a grain of sand (section 7.3) |
| h30 | 125 mm | 11.4 GB | a hand-span (section 7.3) |
| h33 | 1.00 m | 91.3 GB | a 1 m cube (section 9.9) |
| h34 | 2.00 m | 183 GB | a human-scale area of 2 meters, the canonical scale (section 9.2) |
| h40 | 128 m | 11.7 TB | a city block (section 7.3) |
| h46 | 8.19 km | 748 TB | a city (section 9.3) |
| h50 | 131 km | 12.0 PB | a city region (section 7.3) |
| h51 | 262 km | 23.9 PB | a country (section 9.3) |
| h57 | 16,777 km | 1.53 EB | an Earth octant (section 9.3) |
| h60 | 134,218 km | 12.2 EB | the GEO cube (section 9.3) |
| h70 | 137 million km | 12.5 ZB | roughly all installed storage today, as a root (section 6.1) |
| h84 | 2.25 trillion km | 206 YB | half the axis: Earth is centered at 2^84 (section 9.7) |
| h85 | 4.50 trillion km | 411 YB | the whole axis (section 2.1) |
Facing the black sun
Section 11 fixes how a viewer must orient the space: +X screen-right, +Y up, +Z ahead, toward the black sun, a purple marker at the center of the +Z face of the cube (section 11.2, section 11.3). Cyberspace is left-handed, because section 9.4 swaps two axes of a right-handed frame, and three.js is right-handed, so the scene applies the one render-space transform section 11.4 asks for: it negates Z once, the same way ONOSENDAI does. The dashed purple line points the way.