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Comment by shardling | Hacker News Reader

Is there a description anywhere of exactly how the FOV/perception of distance changes as you get closer to c?

Also why is it that you can't see the Lorentz transformations until the final orb? I'd have thought that they'd be apparent somehow -- is it somehow cancelled out by visual effects?

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The papers I read in preparation for the project and my main references:

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=234537 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=91423 http://tobias-lib.uni-tuebingen.de/volltexte/2001/240/pdf/01... http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&#...

There were also a few other documents I had but they don't appear to be hosted online anywhere.

The Lorentz transformations are not as apparent as the visual effects, they're not canceled out though. You can actually see them, try speeding up and slowing down when you have >50 orbs. You'll see a warped view and such :)

I saw a qualitatively different type of warping at 100 orbs than I did at 99. For instance, at 100 orbs, I would see the tops of arches bend and distort as I approached them. No such effect was visible at 99 orbs. I'd pull it up again just to double-check, but it's a bit of a pain to actually collect enough orbs -- a freely adjustable mode once you've beaten it once would be nice :)

I also would have expected to see some sort of length contraction evident in things like the fence post spacing, but I never noticed any.

There was no difference in the calculations at 100 orbs, we just let v/c get much closer to one. The effects were actually there before 100 orbs you probably didn't notice much because of the colors! Internally the colors and Lorenz and time invariance calculations effect different things, the 100 orb stage just removes the operations done in the fragment shader--the vertex sharer remains unaffected.

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