During the exam week
Activities
This week was an exam week in Aalto University, which limited the time our team could work on Virtual Relativity. However, we still managed to have a meeting with one of our contact groups, have a meeting of our own and create some content.Meeting
On Wednesday we held a meeting with Jere Savolainen, a VR enthusiastic from our university. He showed great interest in our project and we had a fruitful discussion about the future. He had excellent points about focus and scope of the project and we got some good ideas for the presentation of the final event.We did not manage to demonstrate our project to Jere due to some technical difficulties. The software for running VR was not up to date on the computer. We learned two important things from this. First, Aalto has quite extensive VR equipment available for use and second we realised how important it is to check the functionalities of the computers in advance. If VR works on one computer it does not necessarily work on another.
Since we could not demonstrate the Virtual Relativity to Jere we set a new meeting. The second meeting with him is supposed to be held on Friday the 10th of November. Then we would be demonstrating him some of the content we have created. This deadline helps to focus our group effort and planing. It should be noted that he told that it could be possible to present our project after the course in Aalto Learning Centre Gala in December.
Scrum of the week
After the meeting with Jere, our group held our weekly scrum. During the scrum we closed in on the ideas we had discussed with Jere. In the final presentation, we should have about three minutest to present our project. That would be enough time for two-to-three quick events. During the following weeks, we aim to implement one scenario at the time starting from the easiest.
Relativistic pipe
The easiest scenario in our opinions is a relativistic pipe. The player is travelling inside a pipe and his/hers movement is restricted into one dimension along the pipe. The pipe has a grid texture for visualising the contractions of space. The programming team managed to make this during last week.
Muon rain
The second scenario we will implement is supposed to visualise the relativity of time. It is based on concrete proof of the theory of relativity. Muons created in cosmic collisions can be measured on earth, even though the distance is greater than what muon could travel within its lifetime. They can reach ground level because their own clocks are moving slower due to time dilation.
Einstein's spaceship
The third scenario tries to show how space and time are related to each other. The player would have two possible observation points, either inside a space ship or outside. The length of the spaceship is one lightsecond and it is moving at a constant velocity in reference to an astronaut. Inside the spaceship there is a light source emitting beams of light from one end to the other. If the observer is inside the spaceship, it takes exactly one second for the beam to reach the other end. However, if the observer is outside, the beam takes a longer time as the end of the spaceship is escaping from underneath. This is depicted in following figure
Analysing the user feedback data
We have some data from the questionnaire we sent two weeks ago. Even though we sent it to our old teachers they did not respond. However from the small dataset we have it would still look like that the project would have a positive reception from the students.
The subset of students seem to want more interactive methods of teaching and better visualisation. It should also be stated that they think Theory of Relativity to be one of the hardest fields of physics. By extrapolating from the data we can say that high school students would be open to this project.