An Immersive Virtual Environment for Special Relativity
In this paper, an immersive virtual environment is presented
which allows the user to virtually explore
and experience special relativity, including
phenomena such as Lorentz contraction, time dilation,
aberration, and finite speed of light.
The relativistic-vehicle-control metaphor - a
physically based camera control technique - is
introduced for navigating at high velocities.
Acceleration of the relativistic observer is investigated.
Furthermore, tracking of both the position and velocity
of the user is considered.
A geometric approach to relativistic polygon
rendering is described. The rendering pipeline
is extended to accomplish the relativistic transformations
in parallel. The implementation supports multiprocessor
and multipipe systems for fast rendering and the
same frame rates can be achieved for relativistic visualization
as for non-relativistic rendering.