Project: Library 4

Team Members:  Charles Schlarp, Matthew Cobblestone, Justin Harden, Michael Alexander, Sai ( Soumya) Kota, Jatin Bhatia

Tagline:  Fluidity - “Our project is a massive fluid dynamics simulation which allows interaction through visual and touch interfaces by multiple users simultaneously.”

Problem:  This program fills the need for large scale dynamic content for the large format displays at hunt library. Because of their high resolution and scale it has been difficult to find content that can both fill the walls and be dynamically generated and engaging to patrons. Our application fulfills both of these needs in a form factor that can be utilized on any computing device that runs a web browser. Since this is the case, it opens up other displays and locations to be able to use our application without any additional modification.

Implementation: This application works by implementing the Navier-Stokes Equations and using WebGL to solve the iterations in parallel. On top of this base functionality we added the ability to interact with the same session from multiple locations through websockets. This allows anyone to navigate to a simple url on anything from a smartphone or tablet all the way up to a high-end laptop or desktop and become part of the visualization. Then in addition to supporting multiple users, we added the ability to have input from a motion tracking camera. This allows for the visualization to be constantly in motion and changing so that it will never become a static as well as adding an additional input method for users to interact with.

Future Work: In the future we hope to implement further functionality to make the visualization more interactive and engaging. We hope to implement a color change functionality that will go along with the time of day to make the simulation more dynamic. Also we have discussed adding the ability to import vector maps from weather data or other sources into the simulation so students can visualize how these events evolve in the real world. Another functionality we are looking into is making it possible for users to change the viscosity of the simulation to that of common fluids so that they could experiment and interact with anything from water or oil all the way to syrup.

Links:

Working demo
Screencast
Github repo