jack@cs.hw.ac.uk (Jack Campin) (12/22/87)
A few days ago I posted the following enquiry to some other newsgroups, and got several "let me know if you find one" replies but not the real goods. I'd forgotten this group, so here goes again: A long time ago I read about a program developed at MIT that produced images of the way ordinary scenes (a street) would look at speeds nearing C. The MIT program produced weirdly drooping lampposts. I don't know if it used a plotter or calligraphic display, but it was so long ago that whatever it did should surely be possible now in real time on a Mac or equivalent. Does anything like that exist (preferably for the Mac or the Sun)? - a sort of flight simulator that would let you define a scene with a 3D graphics editor and then look at it at various fractions of c. (Colour would be a nice optional extra). More ambitiously: what about general relativity? Here I am thinking about some of the descriptions in Kaufmann's "The Cosmic Frontiers of General Relativity" about how the world would look from near a black hole. I was thinking purely kinematically, but the moderator of rec.games.programmer thought dynamics would also be fun to simulate: > This is an interesting potential aspect of graphic adventures, you could > simulate a world in which the speed of light was much smaller, say 55 > mph.Then relativistic effects would be noticed more often and seriously > change the way you play the game. E.G., you can't swing your sword very > quickly because the end gets heavier due to relativistic effects as its > speed approaches 55 mph -- Ron -- ARPA: jack%cs.glasgow.ac.uk@nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk JANET:jack@uk.ac.glasgow.cs USENET: ...mcvax!ukc!cs.glasgow.ac.uk!jack Mail: Jack Campin, Computing Science Department, University of Glasgow, 17 Lilybank Gardens, Glasgow G12 8QQ, Scotland (041 339 8855 x 6045)