Black Hole Flight Simulator

Goals:

  Give the customer (the world) what they want

Features:

  Comprehensive implementation of special relativity (Lorentz transformation use complex quaternions)
  Comprehensive implementation of the complete Reissner-Nordström geometry, including wormhole and white hole connections to successive universes
  General relativistic volume rendering
  Comprehensive implementation of the general relativistic motion of the observer, and of arbitrary numbers of objects moving in the geometry
  Interactive control of the motion of the observer and of numerous aspects of the scene
  Bison Fightpath Interpreter allows total control of every aspect of the scene and flightpath
  Able to render to arbitrary single- or multi-piped graphics configurations
  "Aggressive memory management" option allows complex scenes to be rendered with limited memory
  Numerous accelerations, fast algorithms, and graphic refinements to achieve seamless high-quality rendering while maintaining maximum speed (for example, the volume-rendering uses randomly staggered meshes to reduce artefacts associated with regular meshes)

To do:

  Needed improvements: graphics abstraction layer; higher quality volume-rendering; ray-tracing bundles from rigid objects to quadratic not linear order
  Implement Kerr-Newmann
  Drop a star (e.g. red giant) into BH
  Gravitational waves to linear order
  Hawking radiation
  Reflecting/scattering surfaces (general relativistic, of course)
  Make it writable by an astrophysicist
  Make it usable by a 10 year old

  River model of black holes