Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

MIT Slows Down Speed of Light In New Game

Posted by Unknown on from the woah-man dept.

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).

4 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. First Post echoes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    First in my reference frame that is :)

  2. It's not merely technically challenging. by Dr.+Manhattan · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Would be a complete nightmare to keep synchronous across multiple computers and server though.

    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!
  3. Re:MITT slow? by Anne_Nonymous · · Score: 5, Funny

    That whole red shift/blue shift thing always confuses me too.

  4. There's a book by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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