A Slower Speed of Light: Developing intuition about special relativity with games.

The effects of special relativity are not immediately observable in our everyday lives, so we tend to lack an intuition about them. For this reason, special relativity is often considered too abstract a concept for introductory physics courses. Games may provide one solution to this problem. In this paper, we introduce A Slower Speed of Light, a game by the MIT Game Lab to help students understand and visualize these complex phenomena by artificially lowering the speed of light to walking pace. We also discuss future directions for the game, as well as the release of OpenRelativity, an open-source relativistic toolkit for Unity3D.