Archive for June 22nd, 2008

Virtual Ball Pit

Sunday, June 22nd, 2008


Virtual Ball Pit from Kevin Atkinson on Vimeo.

Kevin Atkinson created a neat virtual ball pit application that works in real time:

I’ve been playing with real-time physics libraries for a while, both 3d and 2d, and I’ve been wanting to do something for a while, but I’ve found it surprisingly difficult to come up with anything that grabbed me. But a couple weeks ago I had a brainwave and wrote this in just a couple days.

For those interested in such things, I didn’t use Box2D, which seems the current champ in developer mindshare in this tiny niche. I started out using it, and it’s quite nice, but it just wasn’t fast enough when I used enough circles/pixels to generate an intelligible representation of the video stream (there’re about a 1000 used in the demo above). Luckily, I chanced across the chipmunk physics library which uses some kind of fancy-pants geometric hashing to speed up collision testing, and it works quite nicely in real-time with 1000 pixels/circles.

Link

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