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You're right that the time delays and redshifting wouldn't add much to a toy app, but some of us are here for the physics.

Honestly it's not so far-fetched (to me) that in a few years someone will have GRRMHD simulations running in real time on a portable device.

Are you familiar with A Slower Speed of Light? It's a game which has some nice special-relativistic effects.

http://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/

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lupsasca 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, such a great game---it's a fantastic visualization of special relativity and also fun to play!

I think we're still a ways off from real time GRMHD sims, but CK Chan from UArizona had a working VR simulation (on the Oculus iirc, but now deprecated) that allowed you to explore a pre-existing GRMHD simulation in real time and in 3D. I think he might be working on a new version of this.

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Y_Y 6 days ago | parent [-]

That's awesome. It's extra crucial to have engaging outreach when your research is so far from application. There's so much scope for wowing people with astro and if you can enrich our culture and justify funding at the same time that's a win-win.

(Just for clarity the second R in GRRMHD is for radiation. I know it's typical to just push some photons through the GRMHD results to produce renders, bit since I'm dreaming let's treat the radiation self-consistently.)

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lupsasca 6 days ago | parent [-]

Hahaha, I half-expected a plasma physicist to complain that GRRMHD is not self-consistent and we need to include non-ideal fluid effects :D

	▲	Y_Y 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Touché. While we're at it there are almost certainly some non-negligible QED processes. I guess there wouldn't be jobs for physicists if this stuff was straightforward.

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20k 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I've been able to port NR to GPU's which with sufficiently powerful hardware can run simulations at about ~30fps with raytracing, to simulate binary black hole collisions. You need something around a top end consumer gpu at the moment. Phone hardware needs a while to catch up, there's an absolute minimum memory requirement of ~8gb vram, and you need a lot more bandwidth than they currently support

	▲	Y_Y 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Awesome! Is it published anywhere? All the stuff I'm familiar with is aimed at old-school clusters.