v3ga Bits and Blobs

[...] We were involved in the creation of an interactive application for a Finnish phone manufacturer which is organizing a promotion tour across Europe this spring and summer. Their whole visuals being based on lavalamp-like shaded bubbles, our challenge was to program a real-time animation based on the flowing of the stretched wax being periodically heat and cooled. It appeared that the metaballs technique was a good model to start playing with, we weren’t exactly in the dark as we had previously done some experiments with that algorithm. We were able to quickly assemble a prototype to see if the idea could work (it did :-) ) an then worked on a physic model which approximated best the bubbles flowing. We read some papers about the subject, but honest the maths were a bit beyond us so we stuck to a simpler model involving some real physics behaviour nevertheless. Of course, we had to fake it a bit but hey in the end, it works pretty well. [...]

Posted by v3ga » Blog Archive » Where’s my head at? on 6 August 2007 @ 1am