But it's the world of the game that gets interesting: as you collect more orbs, the speed of light slows down. The player sees more extreme effects of this as she walks around.
What are some of these effects? For one thing, you'd be able to see beyond visible light into the infrared and ultraviolet spectrum. This is because as an observer moves forward, the light waves she sees coming toward her from other objects get compressed -- they get shorter. Anything producing infrared light will become visible. Eventually it would possible to see radio waves.
Meanwhile, the light waves from any objects she is passing by will stretch out, making the objects look redder. As she looks behind her, the visible light will all eventually move to the infrared. Eventually, even gamma and X-rays would become visible. The phenomenon is known as the Doppler effect.
Another consequence of relativity is concentrating the light from objects in front of you -- and to the sides. It's called relativistic aberration. Objects on either side start to enter the field of view in the front, and the world starts to look like it does through a fish-eye lens. It also means anything in front of you looks brighter. Move backwards, and the world seems to go darker as the light waves you can see come from a narrower and narrower field.
The game also adds in time dilation and altering the length of space dimensions in the direction of motion. As one approaches the speed of light, time slows down –- the observer's clock moves more slowly than a stationary one. This is the source of the "twin paradox" in which one twin who travels near the speed of light for years ages more slowly than her sister on Earth, though the slowly aging twin doesn't notice until she returns to her now-older sisiter. (It's also a common plot device in science fiction novels, notably Joe Haldeman's The Forever War).
Read more at Discovery News
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