I'll guess that this simulates moving quickly through the inside of a donut with a bend in it that follows the mouse. That would explain why the pattern repeats and why the far end always curves down.
The texture moves, simulating movement, if I understand things correctly, with a forced bend at the end to ensure the tube is never straight. And moving the points of the tube a bit to do the mousemove fly thing.
The site is super slow on desktop Firefox on macOS (and fine in Chrome and Safari). I don't have Firefox for Android, but there's probably a connection. I filed a Firefox bug for the performance problem and mentioned the Android crash:
I'm not sure what you mean by "accurate", since all of the interstellar drives that appear in sci-fi depictions are inconsistent with our best current understanding of the laws of physics.
So that's a no (not accurate). Looks like you just see a faint glow/ball of light.
I saw something about when you travel near speed of light, lengths appear to contract. Maybe the lights becoming lines is just based on long exposure in photography of moving lights.
> I saw something about when you travel near speed of light, lengths appear to contract
"Appear" in this context, though, doesn't mean "what you actually see". What you actually see is an apparent rotation of an object moving by you at relativistic speed. This is called Penrose-Terrell rotation:
Note also that the effect is only along the direction of relative motion; appearances transverse to the relative motion are unchanged.
> Maybe the lights becoming lines is just based on long exposure in photography of moving lights.
I think the "lights becoming lines" in sci-fi depictions is based on a Newtonian picture of what things would look like if you were moving through a space filled with stars at a speed much faster than light. Which of course has nothing to do with actual physics as we understand it today.
Did anyone do a Star Trek one for TNG/DS9/VOY/ENT? Most of the ones I saw in the past were only half-correct - they did the "stars moving in streaks parallel to your direction of motion", but did not replicate the "individual streaks show Doppler-shift-like colors".
That's nice, and I don't mean to disparage the work that went into it, but at the end of the day it's just a 2D texture mapped on to a bent pipe.
What's I'd love to see is a 3D star projection undergoing this sort of distortion effect. Something more like the classic Star Trek 3D star field but with vaguely realistic geometric distortions you'd see around a wormhole.
semi-related, I was recently trying out the screensavers on an old Apple IIgs and was dazzled by the warp drive effect - you have stars passing by until you shake the mouse, which prompts the “jump” to hyperspace, an animation that lands you on your desktop. I just love the implication that the system GUI is hyperspace!
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 70.8 ms ] threadhttps://threejs.org/docs/#api/en/geometries/TubeGeometry
The texture moves, simulating movement, if I understand things correctly, with a forced bend at the end to ensure the tube is never straight. And moving the points of the tube a bit to do the mousemove fly thing.
Adult Swim did something like this ex. (plays music) https://www.adultswim.com/music/singles-2018/41
https://imgur.com/a/26aYlbh
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/GKDkd
The original demo that OP copied labeled the effect "Star Wars" although it looks nothing like Star Wars. [1]
[0] - https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Daedalus
[1] - https://tympanus.net/Development/InfiniteTubes/index3.html
I made this dumb thing like seven years ago based on a CSS starfield codepen that was floating around: https://codepen.io/noahblon/pen/GKflw
Somebody should debug this.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1732608
I saw something about when you travel near speed of light, lengths appear to contract. Maybe the lights becoming lines is just based on long exposure in photography of moving lights.
"Appear" in this context, though, doesn't mean "what you actually see". What you actually see is an apparent rotation of an object moving by you at relativistic speed. This is called Penrose-Terrell rotation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrell_rotation
Note also that the effect is only along the direction of relative motion; appearances transverse to the relative motion are unchanged.
> Maybe the lights becoming lines is just based on long exposure in photography of moving lights.
I think the "lights becoming lines" in sci-fi depictions is based on a Newtonian picture of what things would look like if you were moving through a space filled with stars at a speed much faster than light. Which of course has nothing to do with actual physics as we understand it today.
Did anyone do a Star Trek one for TNG/DS9/VOY/ENT? Most of the ones I saw in the past were only half-correct - they did the "stars moving in streaks parallel to your direction of motion", but did not replicate the "individual streaks show Doppler-shift-like colors".
(See e.g.: https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/memoryalpha/images/d/d8/US..., notice the color bands on the "stars".)
What's I'd love to see is a 3D star projection undergoing this sort of distortion effect. Something more like the classic Star Trek 3D star field but with vaguely realistic geometric distortions you'd see around a wormhole.
[4 sec video] https://photos.app.goo.gl/XwnCEgyud7ruBUn77
Ah, here it is: https://nova.app/
(Hover the download button)