Black Hole Playground - Physically accurate black hole visualization for AR and VR
Show HN: Physically accurate black hole you can put in your room
Experience a scientifically accurate black hole simulation right in your living room with Black Hole Playground. Built on the foundation of the science-grade Synchray.jl rendering engine, this web-based tool offers a simplified yet stunning visualization of Kerr black holes. Users can explore the event horizon through multiple modes, including a standard display, immersive Augmented Reality on mobile devices, and Virtual Reality headsets. The platform allows for deep customization of physical parameters like spin, inclination, and jet properties, turning complex astrophysics into an interactive, hands-on experience for enthusiasts and scientists alike.
We have a black hole at home.
- Waterluvian
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.
- lmf4lol
would be nice to have a “make foto” button for mobile
- 20k
If anyone's interested in the accuracy, this is very 'visualisation grade' software. Its a bit of a pet peeve of mine that people present these sims as being very physically accurate, when they contain major inaccuracies, some of which are very obvious and/or deliberate. This one has some serious physical limitations
I wouldn't mind at all if it didn't say that this was a *physically accurate* black hole specifically, but this now falls under misleading science communication in a way that often gets hand waved away as if it doesn't matter, so we've got to clear some things up!
1. The accretion disk shouldn't be red, people just expect it because it looks cool. Black hole accretion disks are near universally hot enough to be blue. Interstellar did this too, and tried to handwave it away very unconvincingly
2. This is a non/low (?) spin black hole, which isn't super duper realistic
3. It ignores the position of the camera (which affects the lorentz shifting)
4. The doppler shifting isn't terribly accurate
5. It doesn't model the accretion disk temperature distribution or colour with any kind of accuracy. Usually you model accretion disks as a blackbody radiator, shift it by the doppler, and to display this convolve this against the human eye response (LMS), go to XYZ, then RGB, do a physical tonemapping step, before an sRGB conversion. This instead does none of that - no step of this is done with any physical accuracy. Its not even illustratively correct as we'll get into
6. Th […]
- nnevatie
The lines in the demo look upscaled and aliased for some reason.
- dluan
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.
- runtime_lens
I wonder how much of that is scale rather than danger. Really large objects can feel unsettling even when you know they're harmless. VR seems especially good at triggering that response.
- arianvanp
The distortion effects dont work for me on pixel 8 when using AR mode
I just get a flat floating image of a black hole. Am i holding it wrong?
- csmoak
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it feels like the leading edge of the accretion disk (coming towards the viewer) should be significantly brighter than it is shown here, and the trailing edge (going away from) should be significantly dimmer?
Or could the brightness shown be a result of it being Kerr vs Schwarzschild?