BACKLIGHT: The Relativistic Raytracer

An anonymous contributor writes "Antony Searle, a physics student at the Australian National University has issued the first public release of BACKLIGHT. From his web page: "In essence a four-dimensional raytracer, [BLACKLIGHT] produces scenes demonstrating the optical effects of special relativity - delayed observation, angular aberration, Doppler shifting and the headlight effect." Check out the Movies section as well. "

Port for IRIX?

[elyard]

Does anyone have the IDO for IRIX 5.3 or 6.2 who might be willing to compile this puppy for those of use who don't have it?

Looks cool.

Port for IRIX?

[elyard]

Spaciba!

I'll try to check it out tonight...

who needs bullets?

[pb]

Gorillas did a good job with bananas... :)

Doppler Realism

[On Lawn]

I liked the movies. My Xanim was *really* choppy though.

I wonder if there is a way to simulate the effects on the actual waves of light, shifting them to higher frequencies and such. That would be spooky, we would start seeing Radio and TV stations as points of light, I wonder what we'd see looking backward.

freaky...
^~~^~^^~~^~^~^~^^~^^~^~^~~^^^~^^~~^~~ ~^~~^~
ABORTED effort:
Close all that you have.

8th grade science project

[On Lawn]

My 8th grade science project incorperated red/blue 3d stereo effects. I remember wishing (and I still wish) I could see an animation of a hypersphere rotation. The Scientific American I got it from had some stills.

My hypersphere project was mothballed when I couldn't figure out a good way to simplify a hypershpere into a frame.

(not bragging, just showing how its been a long standing interest of mine)
^~~^~^^~~^~^~^~^^~^^~^~^~~^^^~^^~~^~~~^~~^~
ABORTED effort:
Close all that you have.

Quake mod?

[slim]

Maybe one day...

At the moment quake doesn't even model Newtonian
physics 100%.

I read that a forthcoming game "Max Payne" will be the first to bother giving bullets velocity, mass etc, and
actually model their paths -- the current model is to make the bullet instantaneously hit the first object in its path.

Coll stuff

[andreas]

This is really nifty. If there's someone out there who's into modeling and raytracing, could you make a short clip visualizig the Picard maneuver?

Cute

[dew]

Very cute -- I'd seen 4D raytracers before, but never one that incorporated relativistic effects. =)
David E. Weekly (dew)

I'm not gonna pretend

[CtrlAltDel]

that i understand any of that, but i think the movies look pretty neet!

For a 40% time reduction...

[LinuxGeek]

Celeron 300a @ 463
bl-op csg.srs -> 8.12sec with x11amp playing ( no stutter at all), rc5des chunking ( nice -19), afterstep, gnome panel, netscape, etc.. 101 processes in all and 10meg into swap w/128meg ram.

I'm compiling egcs19990103 to see if it will improve any more.

Already works

[adiemus]

Hey, is this cool or what?

Plus, it compiles on Linux "out of the box."

gcc -o backlight backlight.cpp

Chris

Port it!

[NaTaS777]

I hope someone will port this to Linux! It would be awesome to have this in Linux!
NaTaS

Been done before

[nic]

Check out John Walker's web site at:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/cship/cship.html [fourmilab.ch]

He started posting this stuff a couple of years ago. I believe he has made the resources available. It's a wonderful site.

Thanks from BACKLIGHT Author

[Antony Searle]

Thnks for your interest everyone.

Re Quake Mod - real time is a BIG problem (certainly can't be raytraced!)

Re John Walker's page, I think it is just plain wrong. And POV-Ray can't be readily modified...

Feel free to e-mail me with questions/comments

[e-mail]