![]() Their depiction is for a movie and my approach is simpler and has a different purpose, so that you can also run it on an ordinary computer.’īecause Verbraeck’s method requires less computing power, it opens the way to new applications. Perhaps we'll get in touch one day, but it’s not so important. ‘I did attend a lecture by one of the researchers, which was interesting. She has not yet been in contact with the people who made Interstellar. ‘In my case, the GPU performs the calculations, including the colouring of the pixels, for all pixels at the same time,’ says Verbraeck. A computer can process images quickly as a result. This is the part of the computer that simultaneously performs the same calculations and is used for many applications. Most of these calculations are performed on the GPU. ‘As a result, although we depict the distortion of the light from the surrounding stars less precisely, the end result looks virtually the same,’ she says. This ensures that you don’t have to perform a very complex calculation for each point on your screen, but that you calculate the situation between different points. It’s a type of grid, divided into sections. But Verbraeck also uses something called an adaptive grid. As a result, in a simulation your perspective in relation to the black hole constantly changes and you will always see a different distortion of the light.īoth Verbraeck and the Interstellar researchers include each star in their calculations. ‘As you get closer to the black part of the hole, the distortion of the light becomes stronger,’ says Verbraeck. ![]() Verbraeck made another important adjustment, which speeds up the calculations. And so you can show the simulation of a black hole on it.’ With the adjustments we've made, the calculations can be performed by an ordinary computer. ‘We’re trying to calculate as little as possible and won’t check the path of a pixel on a frame-by-frame basis. And for Interstellar, a large group of computers had to spend a lot of time performing numerous calculations for each frame. ![]() A film consists of a series of separate images, shown in rapid succession. This makes the simulation of the black hole simpler. ‘By making a beam of light in this way, you lose a little image quality, but you gain speed,’ says Verbraeck. This shape is easier to calculate than an ellipse. She took the vertices of a pixel, creating a polygon. Verbraeck also applies this method, but in a slightly different way. Simply put, for Interstellar, the researchers used an elliptical shape to create a beam of light for each pixel in order to depict all the starlight in the vicinity. How do you know exactly how much light to display for each pixel? To be able to answer this question, things gets complicated. You want to show this for each pixel, because the black hole deflects this light. In this case, that light comes from galaxies and individual stars in the vicinity. This way they get the right colour and intensity. The standard method of constructing an image in computer graphics is to determine where a pixel’s light rays come from. This is because everything is represented in great detail. ‘When you look at the calculations in their paper, you see pages full of complex formulas, which are difficult for many scientists to follow. This requires a huge amount of calculation. So the deflecting light looks different as you approach the black hole. They also took into account how the light changes with the viewer’s perspective. Pixels are the small dots that make up an image.Īs a result, they depicted the effect of the black hole in great detail. Interstellar’s researchers calculated this deflection for each pixel. Because the black hole swallows everything up, the light does not travel in straight lines and is distorted. The light you see as a circle around a black hole comes from the visible stars in the universe. One of the reasons for this is the way in which the images are processed. A lot of computing power was needed and it therefore took a long time to create the images,’ says Verbraeck. ‘Therefore, they wanted to very accurately reproduce the distortion of the image for all the stars, and their approach was quite slow. After all, the blockbuster was shown on IMAX screens in cinemas. For the film Interstellar, it was important that the effect of the black hole on its surroundings was depicted as realistically and as sharply as possible.
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