Physically accurate black hole you can put in your room
Details
- External ID
- 49021270
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Physically accurate black hole you can put in your room
- Website domain
- plav.in
- Launched
- July 23, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 477
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.991636798088411
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
We have a black hole at home — with actual relativistic physics, live in your browser.I'm Sasha (Alexander) Plavin, an astrophysicist at Harvard's Black Hole Initiative studying quasars and black hole environments. I work with raytracing/radiative transfer simulations professionally, and wanted to make one anyone can play with — so I built this app.Put the black hole onto your screen (any browser), or directly into your room with AR or VR (requires WebXR, for example Chrome on Android, or any VR headset). When looking around, pay attention to unintuitive relativistic effects: rays bending around the black hole, and special relativistic "Doppler boosting" changing brightness depending on the viewing angle — zoom out to see the fast jet where the latter effect is especially pronounced. Faint markers show where other viewers are standing right now.Alternatively, put the black hole in front of your camera and watch it lens your actual surroundings. Light winds around the hole, so you see both what's in front of you and what's behind you at once (when the device and browser allow both camera feeds). The closer to the black hole, the stronger the bending — and the longer the light-travel delay: wave at it and watch the changes propagate inward. (unfortunately, WebXR restrictions make AR passthrough and the camera feed mutually exclusive)No signup, basic features work on every device, no data uploaded — the camera feed never leaves your device. Source code: https://github.com/aplavin/blackhole.plav.in.Enjoy having a black hole in your room, or use it for education/outreach — any questions, feedback, or suggestions are welcome!
Enrichment
- Theme
- interactive simulations and creative experiments
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Hardware & robotics
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- physically accurate black hole visualization
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Implementing a physically accurate black hole simulation requires advanced astrophysics knowledge of general relativity, null geodesics in Kerr/Schwarzschild spacetime, and real-time GPU raytracing shaders.
What it would actually take: The system requires custom WebGL/WebGPU fragment shaders that integrate the geodesic equations of motion in curved spacetime (Kerr metric for spinning black holes, including frame dragging and gravitational redshift) per pixel in real time. It demands exact astrophysics formulas, accretion disk radiative transfer models, and complex relativistic Doppler beaming calculations. Developing this demands PhD-level astrophysics research knowledge and high-performance GLSL shader optimization skills.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: Rendering artifacts at larger pixel sizes due to half-resolution upscaling, GR-SR seam implementation needs improvement, Colormap choice lacks scientific rigor compared to perceptually-uniform standards, Simplified matter distribution may not be considered physically accurate, Browser performance limitations for weaker devices
Feature requests: Adaptive MSAA based on device pixel size and compute power, Black hole mass estimation feature for objects in room, Improved matter distribution modeling around black hole
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 52 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #2 of 53 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 255 days after the earliest competitor.
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Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
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