Visualization paraphernalia

I was wondering what physical or visual tools people have used to try to strengthen board visualization. I first found, interestingly, that being familiar with a Rubik's Cube allowed me to better visualize a 3x3 checkerboard. So I've fiddled with a variety of other toys and aids as well, including tactile ones, as shown below.

In addition, I always carry around a picture of a blank chessboard to refer to, and have had a chessboard quadrant taped above my bed for the past 9 months, which I obviously end up staring at and studying every day. I also have a chess wall board up in my room, the type that you use to present a game to a group of spectators.

Always use a tournament size chess board to make your brain get used to the geometric dimensions of the board... I think 🤔 this is what does visualization mean...

It's easy to made, a pen 🖊️ a paper a ruler 📏

The measurements of the tournament chess board in Google

That makes sense! It's kind of like how solo chess helps improve visualization, even though it's more a "chess mini-game" rather than chess itself

I'm not familiar with solo chess - thanks for the link, I've tried it out. It's interesting - it helps with long combinations, I imagine?

As well as physical aids, another thing I'd been experimenting with on myself are various ways to help visualize quadrants. Inspired by https://www.chess.com/blog/OldChessDog/i-see-chess-positions, who says that he sees quadrants as looking like tanks, I found myself thinking that quadrants looked like a warrior brandishing a flail. And I even created a graphical aid to illustrate what I mean:

I imagine different people see different things on the board, just as different cultures see different constellations in the sky?

Yeah like long combinations or capture chains or even just visualizing a few moves ahead

The quadrant pattern definitely helped me navigate the board better, but I still felt that I could continue to get more immersive in navigating the board, so I've exported it as a 3D mesh, and am going over the squares like it's levels in a video game.

I'm thinking of these different colored quadrants as being the brown Desert World, the green Forest World, the red Fire World, and the blue Ocean World.

Here's the latest toy I've been fiddling with, which I've found very helpful so far. I've spent the past couple of days just making various random checkerboard patterns with this board and square magnets on my lap for hours.

Although I must look like a little toddler doing this, I've started to be able to "build" pieces of the board I'm trying to image in my mind like a jigsaw puzzle, and I've found this more manipulative and interactive process to be more resonant and easier for me to picture than trying to remember a static image.