Digital sand

October 25, 2003 11:53 AM

Sand. (Java applet)
posted by Wet Spot (13 comments total)

Cool.
posted by willnot at 1:03 PM on October 25, 2003

very cool.
posted by jimmy at 1:13 PM on October 25, 2003

very very cool.
posted by yevge at 1:17 PM on October 25, 2003

Extra cool. Sad for me though, because I did something similar to this that I thought was original. Gives me some new ideas, though.
posted by skyline at 1:27 PM on October 25, 2003

And pretty cool too!
posted by LouReedsSon at 1:28 PM on October 25, 2003

Flowing through the hourglass
pushing through the funnel
turn once more and racing
all your siblings for the tunnel
slide like the silicone
embrace you as you fall
then bounce around
and let your brothers
crush you to the wall
--Phish, Sand

Yeah, cool.
posted by muckster at 1:46 PM on October 25, 2003

This is going to replace the water applet on my geocities home page.
posted by 2sheets at 1:56 PM on October 25, 2003

You downloaded sand?
posted by trondant at 3:10 PM on October 25, 2003

C'mon 2sheets, I love my lake applet.
posted by cedar at 3:12 PM on October 25, 2003

Waaahhh... Very cool.

Skyline, that's some nice work beyond just the pollen, too. And Processing is very intriguing. I should play around with that some day...

I think that "nifty graphical toys" (or whatever you may want to call them) are definitely the best justification for the existence of java applets. Well, maybe non-graphics-geeks don't feel the same way... but hey.
posted by whatnotever at 3:49 PM on October 25, 2003

It's cool, but I have to note that the other day I downloaded a program that generates a million tree forest, renders it in 3d complete with wind that tosses the branches and blows the leaves, and lets me fly through it, and it used less proc time than this sand does.
posted by Nothing at 12:57 AM on October 26, 2003

Nothing, I never claimed applets were efficient, of course.

And we need links, man. I assume you're talking about IDV's Huge Forest, though The Valley is apparently newer/bigger/better/etc. (Their server really doesn't want to serve me those 10 MB files, though. Oh wait, there it goes; 200KBps is good enough, I guess.)

I'm not sure if you're just dismissive of the applets' processor usage or also of their simplicity. It seems so many people are obsessed with photorealism these days. That's all well and good, but I feel that these other effects, simply pushing pixels instead of polygons, are just as important. Several are more impressive to me, due to the inherent creativity of making something so cool out of such a simple effect.
posted by whatnotever at 8:19 AM on October 26, 2003

Oops, forgot about this thread. Sorry. Yes, that is the link I was talking about.

Anyway, It's not a fair comparison because the huge forest thing uses the capabilities of my graphics card. I was just surprised that it took so much to simulate sand like that. As for the simplicity, I thought it was really cool. I've been playing with it off and on for the past month. I totally agree about the scope of interesting/impressive extending beyond just photo realism.
posted by Nothing at 3:32 AM on November 22, 2003