An Immersive Virtual Environment for Special Relativity

This paper presents an immersive virtual environment 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 is introduced for navigating at high velocities. This is a physically based camera control technique. Accelerations of the relativistic observer are 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 multiprocessing and multipipe systems for fast rendering and the same frame rates can be achieved for relativistic visualization as for nonrelativistic rendering. The new interaction techniques and a well performing implementation make possible a virtual environment that provides an intuitive approach to special relativity.