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Excursions at the Speed of Light
D4C5CE writes "S/F fans can finally find out what you really get to see at relativistic velocity, and tourists are one step closer to "doing Europe in a day" in these amazing Space Time Travel simulations of the Theoretical Astrophysics & Computational Physics department at the Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics Tübingen. They put you in a driver's seat that both Armstrong the Astronaut and Armstrong the Cyclist would equally enjoy, in simulators built to ride a bike at the speed of light."
All this does is attempt to simulate the visual distortion that one would perceive when traveling that fast. The videos look like you could be going 100 mph or whatever in terms of speed, but the distortion of the buildings seems to be what they're trying to get across here. The idea that you could have a long enough street lined with similar enough buildings to even perceive this distortion is beyond fantastical, so there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of point to this other than illustrating the notion that there is visual distortion. But I imagine what you would actually see would be much more of a blur.
They are missing the blueshift you would encounter at that speed. However I guess they couldn't be accurate because wouldn't the frequency would shift to far above the ultraviolet quite quickly?
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