Space Time, by Kevin Odhner

This little piece of art (pktwatch scene by Kevin Odhner) is here renamed Space-time. Click for a 3600 x 2700 pixel version. The Povray scene from Kevin Odhner has been written 1995. Some small modifications have been made like the chosen time of the clock (watch the time!) and the text (there is now a handwritten text of Einstein on the book). Notice the left handed coordinate system. In computer graphics, the left handed system is common. It is the photographers system. Notice that the x-y plane is the plane of the camera retina. The z axes points away from the camera. Povray also by default uses the y coordinate as "up". This is how one thinks in computer graphics. The z-coordinate is the distance to the camera. In relativity, there is an other confusion. Some write (t,x,y,z), others (x,y,z,t), where t is the time.
The watch implementation had been done quite well in 1995. Its not the only Povray watch, it has been done dozens of times independently. I had used a watch implementation from John N. Miller from the July 96 IRTC competition to illustrate this website from March 2002, where the following implementations were rendered in Povray At that time, in 2002, we still phoned in (using my landline phone using a 28 or 56 KBaud modem to the internet. So whenever the internet was used, the phone was blocked. Things could be extremely slow and pictures were therefore at that time required to be small. One would spend enormous effort to reduce the file size of every picture. For websites like this which I wrote in 1998, I even would fight for every pixel in a gif. One would even reduce the color palette to as few colors as possible so that the picture would load in time over a slow modem. Shortly after, Adobe Flash started to become big on the internet. On this page is, a later implementation of the clock in Flash, which gives the actual time. That clock was also used in an animation from 2007, here rendered again, of course with updated course number (click for a larger version)