This applet allows you to start with one of several shapes, move it about in three dimensions, and change the shape's shape. Move your mouse over the different sliders and buttons to see a short description of what they do.

To get the thing going right away, try playing with the three slider bars on the bottom left. They control the movement of the object. Depending on whether you have "spin" or "orbit" selected, these three sliders will control how the shape rotates around the screen.

The various shapes that you can use in this program are some of the basic Platonic Solids - a set of geometrical shapes with special properties. In each of the starting shapes, all the sides are the same length and the angles all have the same magnitude. There are only five shapes that can follow these two rules: the tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, icosahedron, and dodechehedron.