Why in 3D software (like games or 3D modeling apps) if you get too far away from the center point (0, 0 ,0) things get really glitchy and broken?
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An actual ELI5 answer:
Take a Katamari ball rolling up objects. When the ball is tiny (I.e. size of a mouse), similarly tiny objects such as paper clips are visible. When the ball is large (I.e. size of a skyscraper) the paper clips become so insignificantly small that the paper clips become nonexistent.
The larger the numbers (aka “floating points”) become, the larger the Katamari ball. In a video game, pretend that the paper clip is the length of each step your character takes and the Katamari’s size is the magnitude of their position. The further the character walks, their steps become so relatively tiny that the game stops adding those steps to your position and the game becomes unplayable.
This video does a great job of breaking it down with images and in-game footage: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9hdFG2GcNuA
I would also check out floating point formats and how they are stored in memory. If you are familiar with scientific notation and significant digits, then this is why the the larger the number, the less granular they become: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-precision_floating-point_format
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