The ego-centric or first-person visualization is a valuable tool for an introductory course in General Relativity as well as for public outreach to provide a deeper understanding of the geometric distortion effects due to curved spacetime. To enhance this process, interactive visualization allows to scrutinize the effects in more detail as the student can change the parameters and see how they influence the visual result without delays. The image-based technique, borrowed from Special Relativity, restricts to scenes where all objects can be considered to be infinitely far away such that one has to deal only with panorama images. While the accompanying Java application can be used already in beginning classes to General Relativity, the underlying technical details are addressed to the more advanced student.

JGRFlight sources

The Java application (jar) and its sources as well as the data files and the python scripts can be downloaded here:

The "complete" file includes all you need to start the Java application (jar, data, jogamp). Please note that your graphics board has to support OpenGL 3.3 or higher.

The OpenGL rendering is based on the library jogamp version 2.2.3. You should find all necessary files in jogamp-all-platforms.7z. Extract the files into the lib-folder close to JGRFlight.jar. Take care that you do not mix different jogamp versions!