/POINT-VR-Chapter-1

Physics Outreach and Instruction through New Technologies: Developing virtual reality simulations to teach physics.

Primary LanguageC#MIT LicenseMIT

Einstein's Spacetime

is developed by POINT VR, Physics Outreach and Instruction through New Technologies: Developing virtual reality simulations to teach physics.

Chapter 1

Goals

What we aim to convey:

  • Spacetime is a smooth fabric.
  • The curvature of this spacetime is what we recognize as a gravitational field. “Matter tells space how to curve and space tells matter how to move”
  • We can get ripples in the fabric of spacetime: gravitational waves.

Each chapter is approximately 10 minutes worth of content. We will introduce information in smaller, easy to understand pieces via different scenes.

Scene 1

Learning Objective: A 4-dimensional smooth and continuous fabric, called spacetime, makes up our universe.
Implementations: Axes objects appearing at the player origin, clock object illustrating time passage

Scene 2

Learning Objective: Understand gravity as the curvature of this fabric. “Matter tells spacetime how to curve…”
Implementations: Objects with mass interacting with the 3D grid (deforming it). Ranking objects of different masses.

Mass interacting with Space Mass interacting with Time

Scene 3

Learning Objective: “...spacetime tells matter how to move.”
Implementations: Get an earth like object to orbit a sun like object over a 3D grid

Mass interacting with other Mass

License

The MIT license grant is only for items developed by POINT which exist in the POINT-VR-Chapter-1/Assets/POINT and POINT-VR-Chapter-1/Builds folder.