MIT Video Game Plays With Relativity

MIT?s Game Lab released the prototype for A Slower Speed of Light, where the player can fiddle with Einstein?s groundbreaking theories and see what happens to the world.

You play a little girl in a red riding hood cloak?recently deceased, poor thing. You?re in a purgatory land of ghostly figures and huge mushrooms. To escape purgatory you must become "one with the light." Of course, the speed of light is just too fast for you?to catch up with it you?ll need to collect 100 orbs, and as you collect each orb, the speed of light gets slower and slower until it?s almost equal to walking speed.

In the game?s trailer, designer Sonny Sidhu explains the goal: using a familiar type of gameplay, an object-collection mechanic, to let players play with a bizarre concept: manipulating relativity. "It seems like a laughably easy task to collect 100 objects that are visible, strewn around a level, with not much blocking them," Sidhu says. "But it turns out to be much more difficult."

What you see changes as you collect the orbs. At first the environment is mostly dark grays and purples, then things go neon. As the speed of light slows down, you can see infrared and ultraviolet light as well as visible light, denoted by a spectrum at the bottom of the screen accompanied by an "odometer."

The changes in gameplay represent real features of Einstein?s universe. For instance, once you?ve gathered 50 of the orbs, moving forward turns the world bright red, and backing up makes it look green?demonstrating blueshift and redshift, respectively, due to the Doppler effect. Objects in the game will glow brighter as you move toward them, a demo of the "searchlight effect. Once you?ve gathered upward of 80 orbs, time dilation happens and the Lorentz transformation makes time and space expand and contract as you move. Mushrooms bend and warp when you walk under them. It?s tough to get the last few orbs since the targets get smaller as you move toward them.

"People think that relativity is extremely weird," says Gerd Kortemeyer, the game?s owner and an associate professor of physics education at Michigan State University. "We do not grow up with it. It only really becomes apparent when things are moving close to the speed of light, and we just don?t see that in real life."

The open source code that runs the game, called OpenRelativity, is targeted for release in 2013. Kortemeyer calls it a "relativistic game engine" and says other game designers could use the same techniques.

The game, which runs on OS X and Windows, is worth checking out. One caveat: Its creators warn that it may trigger seizures in people with photosensitive epilepsy or motion sickness. Personally, I could have done with some Dramamine before downloading.

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/how-to/blog/mit-video-game-tinkers-with-relativity-14472480?src=rss

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