Alphonse Swinehart:
In our terrestrial view of things, the speed of light seems incredibly fast. But as soon as you view it against the vast distances of the universe, it’s unfortunately very slow. This animation illustrates, in realtime, the journey of a photon of light emitted from the surface of the sun and traveling across a portion of the solar system, from a human perspective.
This visualization of the speed of light and the realization that, on a galactic scale, it’s actually really slow, is all kinds of mind boggling.
Well, I’ll call your real-time CG-animated light travel and I’ll raise you MIT’s slow-motion live-action actual light.
http://www.ted.com/talks/ramesh_raskar_a_camera_that_takes_one_trillion_frames_per_second
Though I’m not quite sure if it’s the slowness or the speed that boggles the mind; mine’s still wobbly 2 years later.
Yikes. The music doesn’t match reality. Needs some mysoftmusic.com music for this. It feels like 45 minutes of Lux Aeterna from 2001. Otherwise, pretty cool idea.