Hyper-Realistic Sand with WebGL2

Found source repo here https://github.com/av/safe-sand

I like how when my phone's forward vector is aligned with world up all the sand falls out.

On a mobile phone it makes a lot more sense. Try shaking it!

Something seems wrong with the stones. They seem to move way to fast. They need more friction.

Does it make Patterns if you put a sine wave on your phone's speaker? What are they called? Moirée patterns?

This brings me a lot of joy. I love little toys that exist for no other reason than "I really want this to be a thing"

I felt like a kid playing with real sand in decades playing with this.

Tried this on desktop and mobile, totally different experiences. I love the residue effect on the screen after I tilt the sand around on mobile. Next step: hourglass or maybe a snow globe?

oh wow, the stones even have some water around them. This looks and feels real.

And if you manage to collect a lot in one place, the sand from the pile does fall like real sand. This is amazing.

The sound is not good though.

It was a lot of fun. I wrote I love you phrase to my gf and she liked it.

I just spent 15 mins playing with this on my phone, it was a lot of fun!

It didn’t look realistic to me until I added `?sand=beach` to the URL. Maybe I only associate sand from the beach as sand. Others I call silt perhaps incorrectly.

This is really cool and give a realistic sense

Wow man, very cool.

I am feeling the sand physically at watching at this, good job!

this is super fun! well done

This one does much better at retaining volume than the smudge demo last week :)

You can play a nice little round of Bocce with the stones

Seeing all the Macbook Pro PROLED XDR Touch Screen geeks finding a use for their new device :D

Cue the whines about not using WebGPU.

anyone who likes that should touch grass

https://grass.turadg.com/

This is very fun to play with.

Zooming on the desktop makes it more dense looking, which is probably not intended but can look very cool IMO.

i feel like i'm watching a stop-motion movie as it moves. very nice

I wouldn’t call it realistic, sand gets stuck in the air, stones don’t rotate, and there’s quite an uncanny valley effect based on angles. Still a cool demo of what is possible, even though I get 10fps or something on a iPhone 15 Pro

I think it's lacking momentum, the sand stops way too abruptly, and the audio also has too harsh cutoff. It also falls too fast.

Otherwise really amazing!

This is annoying to clean up exactly like real sand.

Reminds me of this demo game https://store.steampowered.com/app/3216520/Sandcastle/

Runs like crap on iPhone 14. I know it’s not the current generation of phone but is there really that meaningful of a difference between that and a current one?

Naturally the first instinct of man is to draw a penis.