This a screenshot of an OpenGL program I wrote in my spare time during my undergraduate course to draw scenes with special-relativistic effects.

In this scene the spheres are orbiting clockwise around the centre sphere which is stationary (relative to the camera). The scene is illuminated with two black-body lights from behind the camera, and one green light from the top to show off the Doppler effect (red and blue shift).

If you are interested I have put the program on GitHub.

A stationary image of several dozen spheres orbiting a center sphere. The receding spheres are red shifter, and the approaching spheres are blue-shifted.
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[–] 6 points 6 months ago (3 children)

It makes me think of https://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/ a game where colors and shapes respect relativistic rules of light propagation.

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