06 July 2008

WaterBox Video Demo
Realistic Accelerometer Based Liquid Simulator

WaterBox is actually a fluid simulator that uses the built-in accelerometer to detect the phone movement and simulate the fluid moving across the screen according to phone position and moving direction.

All graphics are done with OpenGL ES although it probbably isn't the best possible choice for 2D graphic but since Teemu is already familiar with codding in OpenGL he decided to use OpenGL engine for this cool application.

This particular example uses 75 particles for the fluid simulation and runs on 90~95 frames per second approximately when using a much faster rendering method which only draws particles as simple points.

Application shown on the demo video uses the more realistic rendering engine known as "metaball renderer" which unfortunately reduces the refresh rate to ~25-30 FPS.

WaterBox is still under heavy development and far away from perfect with tons of improvements that Teemu want to do before even considering to make it public so don't hold your breath waiting for the .sis :[

"I got the original idea for this application when I saw one of the first iWater videos which was really short and poor quality and thought "Cool, they are actually using accelerometer with fluid simulation". It turned out to have a much simpler solution but the idea lived on... and as you can see, this ain't your average iWater! ;)” Teemu said.

"I'd say the application is somewhere mid-beta as there are still few bugs to be fixed, parts I want to rewrite and debug stuff that will be removed from public version. Of course I have lots of feature ideas but if things go well the initial 1.0 release should be available in a couple of weeks." he added in an e-mail that he sent to me today.