Warp
''Look up [[wikt:warp|warp]] in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.'' '''Warp''' may refer to:- [[Warp and weft]], the longitudinal threads in a loom
- [[Warp (projective geometry)]], a mathematical concept
- [[Warp (video games)|Warp (in video games)]], a gameplay mechanic for quick travel
Arts and entertainment
Books and comics
Warp (comics) is an American comic book series published by First Comics from March 1983 to February 1985, spanning 19 issues. The series adapts the 1971 stage play Warp! by Stuart Gordon and Lenny Kleinfeld (as Bury St. Edmund), along with its sequel Warp 2, into a fantasy narrative centered on interdimensional adventure. It follows David Carson, an ordinary bank teller whose nightmares reveal his true identity as the reincarnated Lord Cumulus, a powerful being from the dimension of Fen-Ra who possesses shape-shifting abilities and must battle the tyrannical Prince Chaos.[1] Key plot elements involve dimensional rifts that allow travel between realms, such as when Lord Cumulus crosses into Earth through a cosmic portal, unleashing chaos and forcing confrontations with otherworldly entities like the sorceress Sargon.[2] The storyline emphasizes themes of destiny and multiversal conflict, with Lord Cumulus using his transformative powers to navigate rifts and combat Chaos's forces across realities. In the Transformers franchise, Warp refers to Skywarp, a Decepticon Seeker introduced in the 1984 toyline and featured prominently in Marvel Comics' The Transformers series starting in 1985.) Skywarp is depicted as a black-and-purple F-15 Eagle jet with a mischievous personality, serving as Starscream's loyal but dim-witted subordinate under Megatron.) His detailed backstory involves innate teleportation powers, enabling short-range dimensional jumps up to 10 miles, which he uses for pranks and ambushes rather than strategic warfare, often warping behind Autobot lines to deploy heat-seeking missiles.) This ability stems from his Cybertronian origins, where he participated in early Decepticon assaults on Iacon millions of years ago, later joining the Earth invasion after awakening from stasis in 1984./Marvel_Comics_continuity) Skywarp's teleportation is portrayed as a rift-like distortion of space, adding to the franchise's exploration of advanced alien technology in comic arcs like "And There Shall Come... a Leader!"/Marvel_Comics_continuity) Warp-related concepts in science fiction literature, such as interdimensional travel in these works, often draw inspiration from theoretical physics ideas like spacetime warping, though adapted into narrative devices for storytelling.)Music
Warp Records is a British independent record label founded in Sheffield in 1989 by Steve Beckett, Robert Gordon, and Robert Mitchell, initially as a response to the local electronic music scene known as bleep techno. Specializing in electronic and intelligent dance music (IDM), the label has become renowned for pioneering experimental electronica, releasing influential works that blend ambient, techno, and glitch elements, with artists such as Aphex Twin, Autechre, Boards of Canada, and Squarepusher defining its catalog. Over its history, Warp has expanded beyond dance music into broader electronic genres, maintaining a focus on innovative sound design and album-oriented releases rather than singles, which helped elevate IDM as a respected form in the 1990s.[3] Several musical releases bear the title "Warp," spanning various genres and eras. New Musik's 1982 album Warp, their third studio effort, incorporates new wave and synth-pop with electronic textures, featuring tracks like the title song that explores futuristic themes through layered synthesizers and rhythmic pulses.[4] In electronic music, 16th Element's "Warp" (2002) is a house single with abstract production, emphasizing atmospheric effects typical of early 2000s underground electronic tracks.[5] More recently, electronic acts have revisited the theme; for instance, the industrial-leaning Front Line Assembly's discography includes experimental elements akin to warping sounds, though no exact 2021 album titled Warp exists, their 2021 release Mechanical Soul incorporates distorted electronics evoking spatial manipulation. Songs titled "Warp" often evoke themes of speed, distortion, and otherworldliness, frequently employing electronic production techniques to simulate auditory warping. The Bloody Beetroots' "Warp 1.9" (2009, featuring Steve Aoki) is a high-energy electro-house track characterized by aggressive synth distortions and glitchy effects that mimic accelerating through digital space, produced with heavy compression and filtered sweeps for a sense of velocity and rupture.[6] Similarly, New Musik's "Warp" (1982) uses modulated vocals and echoing synths to create a bending, elastic soundscape, enhancing lyrics about systemic change and innovation.[7] In soundtrack music, Thomas Newman's "Warp" (2016, from Finding Dory) employs subtle electronic warbles and orchestral swells to convey fluid, transformative motion.[8] Warp-themed tracks sometimes draw on time warp motifs inspired by physics concepts like relativity, as seen in The Rocky Horror Picture Show's "Time Warp" (1975), where lyrics describe disorienting temporal shifts amid funky, repetitive rhythms that evoke looping through spacetime.) Production in these pieces often relies on effects like pitch-shifting and reverb modulation to produce the illusion of sonic bending, a technique common in electronic music to represent conceptual warping.[9]Film and television
In the Star Trek franchise, warp drive serves as a central fictional technology enabling faster-than-light (FTL) travel for starships, propelling them through subspace to explore distant regions of space. Introduced in the original series' second pilot episode, "Where No Man Has Gone Before," which aired on September 22, 1966, the system is depicted as generating a warp field that contracts space ahead of the vessel and expands it behind, allowing effective superluminal speeds without violating relativity within the ship's frame. The episode establishes the foundational concept, where the USS Enterprise attempts extreme warp speeds—such as warp 11—near the galactic barrier, highlighting risks like energy surges and crew mutations from the drive's interaction with exotic phenomena. Warp factors in the franchise quantify these speeds on a non-linear scale, with warp 1 equivalent to the speed of light and higher factors representing exponentially increasing multiples; for instance, in the original series era, warp 9.9 and beyond approach near-infinite velocities relative to sublight travel, enabling rapid interstellar journeys that would otherwise take centuries.[10] This mechanic recurs across subsequent series and films, such as The Next Generation and the Kelvin Timeline movies, where warp jumps are routine for Federation vessels, often tied to plot devices involving pursuits, explorations, or emergencies. The technology draws loose inspiration from theoretical physics concepts like spacetime warping but is adapted for narrative purposes in sci-fi storytelling.[11] In Doctor Who, temporal distortions manipulated by antagonists are prominently featured in the 1969 serial "The War Games," a ten-episode story spanning April to June of that year.[12] The Second Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe land on a planet simulating historical battlefields, where alien War Lords use SIDRAT machines—resembling the TARDIS—to abduct soldiers from various eras and brainwash them via time-sensitive processing, creating warped zones that blend timelines and induce psychological disorientation.[12] The narrative culminates in the Doctor contacting the Time Lords to dismantle the operation, emphasizing themes of temporal manipulation and the ethical perils of altering history, with the "warp" effect manifesting as disorienting shifts between war periods like World War I and the American Civil War.[12] Independent sci-fi cinema has occasionally explored "warp" through psychological lenses, as seen in the 2017 short film Warp, directed by an independent team, which follows a journalist investigating supernatural occurrences among drug addicts, revealing mental "warping" induced by hallucinogenic experiences mimicking alternate realities.[13] Clocking in at under 10 minutes, the film uses low-budget effects to blur the line between substance-induced psychosis and genuine temporal anomalies, offering a grounded contrast to grand-scale space opera depictions.[13] Depicting warp jumps in films requires specialized visual effects techniques to convey the disorienting transition to FTL, often involving streaking starfields, elongated nacelle glows, and subspace distortions unique to cinematic production. In Star Trek films like The Motion Picture (1979), early effects used slit-scan photography for a psychedelic tunnel effect during warp entry, evolving in later entries such as Star Trek Beyond (2016) to computer-generated imagery simulating actual spacetime curvature with rippling energy waves around the hull.[11] These techniques, pioneered by Industrial Light & Magic, prioritize spectacle and immersion, with post-production compositing ensuring seamless integration of practical models and digital elements to evoke the sensation of velocity without real-world physics constraints.Video games
Warp (2012 video game)Warp is a puzzle-based stealth action game developed by Trapdoor Inc. and published by Electronic Arts under its EA Partners label.[14] Released on February 15, 2012, for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, with a Microsoft Windows port following on March 21, 2012, the game centers on Zero, a small orange alien abducted by humans and experimented on in an underwater facility.[15] Players control Zero, who uses a core ability to "warp" or teleport through solid objects and enemies, creating strategic opportunities for evasion and combat in top-down 2D environments with 3D elements.[16] This warping mechanic includes a cooldown period after each use, forcing players to plan movements carefully amid hazards like lasers, turrets, and patrolling guards.[17] Gameplay emphasizes spatial puzzles, where warping allows Zero to phase into walls, ceilings, or foes to possess and control them briefly, turning enemies against each other or accessing hidden paths.[18] Levels progress through increasingly complex facility sectors, culminating in boss encounters that test mastery of warping for dodging attacks and exploiting weak points.[19] The game's black-and-white art style with splashes of color highlights Zero's vibrant form, enhancing the alien's vulnerability and the tension of stealth sections.[16] Critically, Warp received praise for its innovative teleportation system but mixed reception for repetitive level design, earning a Metacritic score of 73/100.[17] Warp mechanics in the Super Mario series
Warp pipes, a signature transportation mechanic in the Super Mario franchise, were introduced in Super Mario Bros. (1985) as green conduits allowing instant transitions between levels or worlds. Designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, the pipes draw inspiration from a real-life plastic pipe Miyamoto encountered protruding from a Kyoto warehouse wall during his youth, evoking curiosity about hidden spaces.[20] In gameplay, Mario or Luigi enters a pipe by jumping in, emerging elsewhere to bypass sections or access secrets, often guarded by Piranha Plants that emerge to attack.[21] These mechanics facilitate spatial puzzles, such as aligning jumps to enter upward or sideways pipes for bonus areas, with cooldown-like delays in some titles where pipes lead to timed challenges. Secret warp zones, like those in World 1-2 of the original game, enable skipping ahead to later worlds (e.g., directly to World 4), altering difficulty progression and encouraging exploration. Evolving across sequels, warp pipes appear in 3D titles like Super Mario 64 (1996) as portals to paintings and in modern entries like Super Mario Odyssey (2017) for kingdom-hopping, maintaining their role in seamless level traversal. The mechanic's enduring impact lies in its simple yet versatile design, blending platforming with teleportation for intuitive yet strategic navigation.[21]
Science and technology
Physics
In general relativity, the concept of warping refers to the curvature of spacetime induced by the distribution of mass and energy, fundamentally altering the geometry through which objects and light propagate. This warping manifests as gravity, where massive bodies like stars or galaxies distort the fabric of spacetime, causing paths to deviate from straight lines in flat space. The theoretical foundation is provided by Einstein's field equations, which mathematically link the curvature of spacetime to the stress-energy content of the universe: G_{\mu\nu} = \frac{8\pi G}{c^4} T_{\mu\nu} Here, G_{\mu\nu} is the Einstein tensor encoding the geometry of spacetime, T_{\mu\nu} is the stress-energy tensor describing matter and energy, G is the gravitational constant, and c is the speed of light. These equations, first presented by Albert Einstein in 1915, predict that spacetime curvature affects all forms of energy, including electromagnetic radiation.[22] A prominent observable consequence of spacetime warping is gravitational lensing, where the gravity of a massive object bends light from a more distant source, magnifying, distorting, or multiplying its image as seen by an observer. This effect serves as direct evidence for general relativity's predictions, with strong lensing producing arcs or rings around the lensing mass. For instance, the galaxy cluster Abell 1689 has been imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope, revealing multiple distorted images of background galaxies due to the cluster's immense gravitational field warping spacetime along the line of sight. Such observations not only confirm the theory but also enable astronomers to map dark matter distributions.[23] The Alcubierre warp drive represents a speculative application of spacetime warping for propulsion, proposing a solution to Einstein's field equations that permits effective superluminal travel without locally exceeding the speed of light. Introduced by theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994, the model envisions a "warp bubble" around a spacecraft, where spacetime contracts ahead of the bubble and expands behind it, propelling the bubble—and the ship within—forward at arbitrary speeds relative to distant observers. The line element for this metric is: ds^2 = -dt^2 + [dx - v_s f(r_s) dt]^2 + dy^2 + dz^2 In this expression, v_s denotes the bubble's velocity, r_s is the distance from the ship's center, and f(r_s) is a smooth shape function that transitions from 1 outside the bubble to 0 inside, ensuring flat spacetime locally for the traveler. However, constructing such a configuration demands regions of negative energy density to violate standard energy conditions, typically requiring exotic matter with properties not observed in nature, along with enormous total energy equivalents—initially estimated as exceeding the mass-energy of the observable universe, though later refinements suggest reductions to planetary scales under optimistic assumptions.[24] Frame-dragging, or the gravitomagnetic effect, illustrates a verified dynamic form of spacetime warping, wherein a rotating mass like Earth twists the surrounding spacetime, imparting a rotational drag to nearby objects or light paths. This Lense-Thirring effect, derived from the field equations' solutions for rotating bodies, was experimentally confirmed by NASA's Gravity Probe B mission, launched in 2004 and operational until 2011. Orbiting at 640 km altitude, the satellite's four superconducting gyroscopes measured minute precessions: the frame-dragging component was detected at -37.2 \pm 7.2 milliarcseconds per year, aligning with general relativity's prediction of -39.2 mas/yr to within 19% accuracy, after accounting for systematic uncertainties in gyroscope performance and electrostatic charging. These results provide empirical validation of warping's rotational aspects, distinct from static curvature.[25]Computing
In parallel computing, particularly within NVIDIA's CUDA programming model, a warp denotes the smallest unit of thread execution, consisting of 32 threads that operate in lockstep using a Single Instruction, Multiple Threads (SIMT) architecture on the GPU's streaming multiprocessors (SMs). This design enables efficient parallel processing by allowing the hardware to issue the same instruction to all threads in the warp simultaneously, maximizing utilization of the GPU's execution resources. Introduced with the initial release of CUDA in November 2006 alongside the GeForce 8-series GPUs, the warp concept optimizes for the inherent parallelism in compute-intensive tasks such as scientific simulations and machine learning workloads.[26] Warp scheduling is managed by dedicated hardware schedulers within each SM, which select and dispatch warps to the execution pipelines in a way that conceals memory latency and sustains high throughput; typically, multiple warps (up to 64 or more, depending on the architecture) are maintained in a resident set per SM to enable context switching without stalling. However, performance can degrade due to warp divergence, where conditional branches cause threads within a warp to follow divergent execution paths based on data-dependent conditions; in such cases, the SM serializes execution by disabling inactive threads and reactivating them for subsequent paths, effectively reducing parallelism to the size of the largest divergent branch. This penalty underscores the importance of writing warp-uniform code, as divergence can halve or worse the effective throughput on affected warps. Warp-level primitives, introduced in later CUDA versions, further enhance control by allowing collective operations across the 32 threads, such as voting or shuffling data, to support advanced algorithms like reductions and prefix sums.[27][28] In computer graphics, texture warping refers to the geometric transformation process that distorts a 2D texture image to conform to the irregular surfaces of a 3D model, ensuring perspective-correct mapping during rendering. This technique, foundational to modern texture mapping, involves computing warped texture coordinates (u, v) for each pixel on the surface and resampling the source texture using interpolation methods to avoid aliasing and distortion artifacts. A seminal approach, bilinear warping, applies separable linear interpolation in both texture dimensions to estimate values at non-integer coordinates, providing smooth transitions while being computationally efficient for real-time applications; it computes the weighted average of the four nearest texels based on fractional offsets. Developed in the late 1980s as part of broader efforts in image processing and graphics, this method underpins texture application in APIs like OpenGL, where functions such asglTexCoord and bilinear filtering modes enable developers to warp textures onto polygons with hardware acceleration.[29]