7 comments

  • dluan 1 minute ago
    I remember like 10 years ago when Occulus first came out there was that space simulation demo where you could go around the solar system in VR. You could also "fast travel" by zooming in towards a planet, moon, blackhole.

    Yeah, that was the day I learned I have a deep, crippling phobia of large objects. And Melanoheliophobia, which is fear of black holes. The only other time I've felt that way was snorkeling once near a giant 3 story tall bait ball of swirling fish, which was so disorienting and panic inducing that I vomited.

  • Waterluvian 1 hour ago
    It’s fascinating how things that were inverted seem to become corrected when I point this at the pre-existing black hole in my room.
  • aizk 45 minutes ago
    Very cool, and very mind bending. Very faithful to the Event Horizon Telescope rendering. A decade ago I got really into black holes for like a few months, and I read Kip Thorne's book called "The Science of Interstellar", talking all about black hole simulations. Have you read it? I wonder how the simulation tech has evolved, as 10 years is a lot. I do wonder if you do like, size estimates of a black hole in my room. Suppose I have a black hole in my room, I'd be curious to know what the mass of that is, like a fun fact, tidbit somewhere.
  • hahahaa 1 hour ago
    First time I have AR'd. That was cool. How does it keep the hole in the same point in space as I walk about?
    • dmd 1 hour ago
      The app doesn't have to do this itself, phones do it for you. ARCore on Android, ARKit on iOS.
      • hahahaa 50 minutes ago
        Oh yeah I mean how do the phones do that. I guess it uses dead reckoning with visual cues and some machine learning.
        • forsalebypwner 4 minutes ago
          on iPhone 12 Pro Max and later (maybe only on Pros, I forget) they have a LiDAR sensor built in, allowing for impressively accurate 3D scans of objects with a free app like Scaniverse. But yeah I think AR was the intention there
        • dmd 30 minutes ago
          "SLAM" is the term to google.
        • boothby 30 minutes ago
          Your phone has an accelerometer, which can be integrated twice to result in slightly accurate dead reckoning; just keep accumulating 3-vectors with every time-slice. That's a helluva lot easier than visual cues.
          • addaon 20 minutes ago
            "slightly accurate" is the correct description, though -- dead reckoning on a cell-phone-class IMU accumulates drift too quickly to keep objects anchored in space for more than seconds at a time. You need something (visual odometry, SLAM) that provides long-term stability, even if it has short-term noise or poor availability, to fuse in.
  • api 55 minutes ago
    The singularity is near.