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?
Same on pixel 10
Show HN: Physically accurate black hole you can put in your room
81–90 of 204 posts
Re: Show HN: Physically accurate black hole you can put in your room
#82I 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 nea…
If somebody feels no fear while zooming towards a black hole, their brain has some strange wires crossed. Strongly recommend Outer Wilds. Falling into the black hole the first time was one of my most scared moments in gaming. I was totally panicking lol
Easy cure, simply watch "The Black Hole",https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Hole_(1979_film) and you won't ever be able to take them seriously again.
Side effects may include overwhelming hate for Walt Disney Productions.
Re: Show HN: Physically accurate black hole you can put in your room
#83If 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…
I clicked on this because I worked on the infra that simulated the famous blackhole sim in interstella.
I thought "oooh this is interesting I wonder how they are going to do physically accurate on an end device" Recalling how the original particle sim was something like 100TB, took 2 weeks to generate and seemed to write in a way that killed disks. but that was >10 years ago, so what clever stuff has been done to model it locally.
Its been a long time since I've looked at black holes, but what I'm not understanding is why the stars surrounding the black hole are just points, and more over why the lines are straight to the centre of the hole. from memory the way light enters the hole appears non-linear and changes on view point.
Re: Show HN: Physically accurate black hole you can put in your room
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Melanoheliophobia Tangential, but this being a nearly word-for-word translation of “black hole fear” made me realize how odd it is that we insist on latinizing these things.
I've also wondered the same thing about healthcare and other fields. All the complex sounding phrases are child-like in simplicity in their "native" tongue, yet completely indecipherable to most people in modern times. Quite a weird and undesirable path we ended up going down through inertia.
I’ve long considered medical jargon to be Latin Buffyspeak[1] because it’s usually just describing the body part, often simplistically, but in Latin so it sounds fancy.
Re: Show HN: Physically accurate black hole you can put in your room
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but I think there's some cause/effect to consider there. The same logic would have applied in Ancient Rome, but I expect that people would have likely been less casual with their usage of such terms when they also had specific technical meanings. For example many food dishes we have retain basic naming conventions, yet have well understood meaning. In the US a customer ordering spaghetti is likely to be quite u…
"Spaghetti" is a great example - notice how you have specific expectations of food that happens to be named in a foreign (relative to where you live) language.
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Re: Show HN: Physically accurate black hole you can put in your room
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, is there anyone alive who wouldn't be afraid of a black hole? It's a celestial body so gargantuan its gravity bends the light passing around it like a lens. Anyone who gets too close to one will literally never be seen again, ever.
They don’t have to be gargantuan (except in terms of mass) - the low end of stellar mass black holes can have radii as small as 6 km. Many black holes have a bright accretion disk outside their event horizon, so visibility for those is not an issue. But it’s certainly possible to have maximally scary black holes that have no accretion disk and are small enough so as not to cause significant lensing. You could fly you…
The event horizon might have a circumference as small as 12*Pi km but as I understand it, the radius is infinite. ;)
Re: Show HN: Physically accurate black hole you can put in your room
#87I 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 nea…
Sorry but a word for fear of black holes is ridiculous. Black holes are scary period. Anyone not feeling a deep sense of fear during that VR experience is missing something.
I think it’s perfectly reasonable to have a word for this fear, but I agree that ‘phobia’ isn’t appropriate because (unless you’re worried about running into one on the way to the shops) it’s quite rational. ;)
Re: Show HN: Physically accurate black hole you can put in your room
#88I 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 nea…
Thanks for sharing – as someone who studies black hole environments daily, I didn't even think of such a phobia existing! I wonder if some tricks, adjustments are feasible, to minimize the effects of these phobias? I see these visualizations as a pathway to make understanding such a complicated, unintuitive object more accessible – and would be great to make it even more accessible, if it makes sense... Happy to chat…
I have no idea, on screen or even in movies it's totally fine, but I think just in VR where it's so immersive, and then being confronted with a thing that my brain doesn't really know how to understand the size of. Just like, hey there lil guy I know you're big and massive, wait where is your edge...
Re: Show HN: Physically accurate black hole you can put in your room
#89I 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 nea…
Sorry but a word for fear of black holes is ridiculous. Black holes are scary period. Anyone not feeling a deep sense of fear during that VR experience is missing something.
VR is fine when it's small cute bunnies or little golf balls that I can kind of immediately get a sense of scale for. Massive thing that tricks my brain like the edge of a gas giant is terrifying, no matter how much I tell myself it's just a screen or video or pixels.
Re: Show HN: Physically accurate black hole you can put in your room
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Melanoheliophobia Tangential, but this being a nearly word-for-word translation of “black hole fear” made me realize how odd it is that we insist on latinizing these things.
Helio- is actually "sun", not "hole", and it's Greek, not Latin, but I 100% agree with you: it's pointless technical vocabulary that only serves to obfuscate. I think in this particular case, it's just some internet neologism (which is a good word, since coinage can mean a couple different things), made based on analogies with older phobias. For those of us who know Latin and Greek, though, all we can really do is sh…
My headcanon is that the neologism was coined by Vicky Karayiannis, widow of Chris Cornell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Cornell#Personal_life
The modern Greek terms for "black hole" are:
μαύρη τρύπα or μελανή οπή
https://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%9C%CE%B1%CF%8D%CF%81%CE%B7...
helio- cannot mean "star" in a generic way but invariably refers to our own Sun. If referring to some other star, then we use aster-.