A virtual boat trip at light speed
2 Jul 2018 by Evoluted New Media
Physicists in Belgium have developed a virtual reality simulation of the theory of relativity as a science education and communication tool.
The team from Ghent University made a VR movie – Captain Einstein – showing a world where light speed is a mere 20km/h.
The team say that even for experienced physicists it is not so easy to understand the precise physical meaning of the different abstract concepts of Einstein’s theory. To bridge this gap between theory and reality, physicists Karel Van Acoleyen and Jos Van Doorsselaere developed the work.
In collaboration with LUCA School of Arts and the cross-media company Fisheye they created a virtual tourist boat trip in the city of Ghent. During the trip the boat gradually accelerates towards the imagined light speed of 20km/h, which allows the visualisation of different relativistic effects bit by bit. It shows, for instance, how the towers of Ghent bend because we always look back in time, and fantastic rainbows in the sky – due to the Doppler shift that makes the infrared radiation visible at relativistic speeds.
The science behind the film is explained for the wider public at the website captaineinstein.org, while a more technical paper appears on the arXiv, the central open access physics website.
