Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pointernil 4588 days ago
This is really very impressive and thanks for sharing!

How many single particles are visible at every moment? Would it be possible to control the movement of the particles by the fluid field to form predefined shapes? to make them cluster into predefined (even moving) areas?

For some time now, i wonder if it would be possible to visualize some population statistics (think the percentile wealth distribution f.e. ;) by using some thing like this and make every single person "visible" within the statistic.

I believe it would make many "distributions" more intuitively understandable. Imagine some several thousand single "very wealthy" entities contrasted by several thousands or millions of "average" entities ;)

Obviously such interactive diagrams easily hit (hardware/software) limits, but even if displayed with some mapping like 1 point equals several (hundreds/thousands) real world entities, i think such display of magnitude in the real world would be very engaging.

Thanks again.

1 comments

1024x512 = 524288, that's over half a million and they're all visible. So far, they don't carry more individual properties than a position and a motion vector, but i could easily imagine to add another texture for that, and at some point i will also go for more life-like entities with adjustable distributions of status and needs values too, maybe to model behavior in a dynamic system of hunters and gatherers, you know. Give them very basic intelligence, intents, and planning. I had also thought of using a physics simulation for a skeleton model and neural nets for sensors and actuators. But I'm drifting away and I'm helpless in god-mode. Statistics is computationally heavy and i won't add anything like that too soon. It is and will be an abstract cat toy.