http://www.kodama.hc.uec.ac.jp/project/protrude.html

I found this project mentioned on futurefeeder. It’s from 2001 and seems to be relatively well known but I thought it was really interesting so I wanted to post it here. This is by Sachiko Kodama and Minako Takeno and they’re playing with magnetic fluid or “ferrofluid”. It’s essentially some sort of oil or water that has had ferromagnetic metal powder dissolved in it- allowing the magnetic field to produce some very striking forms. I’m not sure if this is technically a simulation project, but it’s in the same arena. They’re controlling the forms that the fluid take electronically which responds to the noise in the room. The paper found here describes how they pulled this off. It also describes the forces that are needed to produce specific shapes such as a “jellyfish” shape. It would be interesting to try to the behaviours of this fluid and apply it to a physics system in a program- essentially simulate what is going on here. Since the video is a live demo, we don’t have any sort of interactivity to the project– it would be great to see this live and have controls that would allow us to tweak the controls and see what the shapes morph into when different amounts of current are added to it.