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MIT Slows Down Speed of Light In New Game
New submitter schirra writes "Researchers at MIT Game Lab have created a free video game that accurately simulates the effects of Einstein's relativity. 'A Slower Speed of Light' challenges players to collect objects strewn throughout a level to artificially lower the speed of light. As light speed slows to walking pace, it makes visible the unusual effects one encounters when traveling close to the speed of light, such as the Doppler effect, searchlight effect and Lorentz transformation. The effects are, in a word, trippy. The team plans to release an open-source Unity3D toolkit called OpenRelativity to allow others to include the same relativistic effects in other games."
They also plan to release the source code sometime next year (despite reports that it is open source already).
Maybe if he'd been faster he'd have won.
Meh, bad joke, mod me down :(
However, this does sound like a pretty fun game. I haven't played anything in years, I might just try this one.
Free Martian Whores!
First in my reference frame that is :)
Somehow bragging about the open source nature of the project but not making it available on an open source OSes begs the question: WTF?
I wonder if it has anything to do with the current status of video graphics on open source OSes.
I've often wished someone would do something like this. I've suggested on slashdot an interstellar military/trading game that would take relativity into account as a way to give people a more intuitive feel for it. I've wondered about the difficulties of a 2D game that would use a slow speed of light. But to have a 3D game that considers all the effects, including red-shift, is beyond my wildest dreams. I look forward to downloading and playing it.
Have you actually *tried* this game? Cus' it's a long way off from a big-ass 4x sorta game. I mean the game is fun, interesting and trippy and all that, but it is kinda rudimentary.
Would be fun to play on a large screen while in an altered state though.
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
It's just a matter of timing loops, not hard at all.
Would be a complete nightmare to keep synchronous across multiple computers and server though.
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
And everyone in the real world still thinks at the same rate. With turn-based games, you can do a little better - e.g. chess clocks that give dissimilar players different amounts of time - but for a continuous game it's rougher. And picture, you're walking down a hall, and suddenly things go slower because someone all the way on the other side of the map starts sprinting. It adds a whole new layer of lag-like behavior on top of the relativistic effects you're trying to simulate.
The key thing about relativity is that, no matter what speed you're moving at, you feel the same. It's just that everything around you behaves differently. Slowing the game clock down because other people are going fast doesn't simulate that at all.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SxWMI9zg3s
There is no such thing as "synchronous" when you're talking about relativistic effects.
Getting around that would be a very interesting problem to try to solve in multiplayer. At first blush, it seems impossible: player 1 won't be experiencing the same moment of time as player 2 at any given time. However, whenever two players interact in any way, whatever caused the interaction has to have happened for both players and that includes even just seeing them. If you can keep a log of what player 2 did in the past, you can figure out what instant of player 2's timeline player one should be seeing (of you could just simulate the actual flight of the photons, but that seems computationally impossible). And you can do the same for player 2's screen drawing player 1.
As long as, just like in the real world, no one can travel faster than light you'll always have all the information you need. If you allow FTL though, everything breaks, you can set up situations where you simply won't have the information about player 2 that you need to draw player 1's screen, which is awesome because it maps directly to breaking causality in the real world.
This stuff is explored in Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland, by George Gamow. The title character has various dreams which illustrate aspects of modern physics. For example, he dreams about riding a bicycle while the speed of light is 30 mph, and playing billiards with Planck's constant = 1. It's an interesting read; I recommend the omnibus Mr. Tompkins in Paperback, which has Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland and Mr. Tompkins Explores the Atom
Like Velocity Raptor?
Actually, not even that is true. The effects of relativity aren't due to photon flight time. Imagine one player running at even a tenth the speed of light. When they stop, they would have only experienced say, a minute, but a stationary player should have been experiencing many hours. You'd either have to know what the stationary player is going to do in the future, or artificially slow down the travelling player, which sorta defeats the purpose.
I'd be even more impressed if they managed to make it multiplayer. Maybe merge this with the Resequence Engine? Not for time travel necessarily, but because they've already worked out how to run multiple reference frames at once, and I suspect you'd need an event buffer for every pair of players, and possibly to introduce a preferred reference frame as well for simulating the environment.
It's not possible to accurately simulate special relativity in a multiplayer setting. Just consider the twin paradox: two players are near each other, one accelerates away to a relativistic speed, and then accelerates his way back. The two players are back near each other, but the stationary player must have experienced more local time pass than the traveling player. That cannot be simulated while maintaining the invariant that each player experiences time as if they were their avatar. In other words, the "avatar clock" (I'm trying not to call it the game clock since relativity means there's no single clock) cannot match real time.
It works fine for a single player game, of course (and you can add any number of NPCs as long as you can speed up their simulation by the appropriate ratio and still have your CPU keep up - there would be a hard limit due to CPU usage here unless the NPCs' state can be computed at a given instant in time instead of requiring simulation step by step).
That whole red shift/blue shift thing always confuses me too
Here is red/blue shift (to my understanding) in a nutshell:
First, remember that the frequency of light determines what color it will be. In the visible light spectrum, red is at one end and has the lowest frequency of visible light. Blue light has a higher frequency and is found towards the opposite end of the visible spectrum. Also, remember that the speed is a constant. When you see something, you see the light bouncing off of it. If an object is coming towards you, the light does not go 'the speed of light' + the object's velocity. The speed of light remains a constant. So instead, that extra energy shifts the light to a higher frequency. This is blue shift. When an object is moving away from you, the light bouncing off of an object does not go 'the speed of light' minus that object's velocity. The speed of light remains constant. Instead that energy is taken from its frequency. This is red shift.
I think immersion in the right simulating environment can give people a level of physical intuition that many physicists never achieve.
A small enhancement to the game to make time dilatation more obvious would be making the balls bounce. I think.
The speed is the same across the spectrum.
http://www.xkcd.com/1125/
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Yeah, that would be great.
First time through, I was disappointed that I couldn't see objects that were behind me appearing in front of me when traveling quickly, but maybe I'm missing something about how light aberration works with other relativistic effects?
Before I read the description after the "game" is over, I was confused about why behind me didn't turn black any more when I got that last orb. That's a dramatic modification, maybe there should be an in-game message about the change.
Also I still don't quite get why certain things were still visible in the blackness behind me while looking backwards -- is that infrared traveling faster than visible light?
$ echo "ceci n'est pas une pipe" | sed -Ee 's/(eci n|pas )//g'