Matlab Particles 2.0

When Karl Sims did his award-winning computer animation ”Particle Dreams” twenty(!) years ago, he tortured a Connection Machine CM-2 computer with as many as 65,536 processors, using one processor for the simulation of each particle.

Today we simulate tens of thousands of particles in real-time on a single cpu – even in a browser plugin – and advanced particle systems have become common practice for the simulation of snow, rain, dust, smoke, fire, and explosions in most computer games. Modern simulation environments like Processing can be used to produce such astonishingly addicting games as Falling Sand Game, sodaplay, BallDroppings, and Souptoys.

In 2006, Traer Bernstein wrote a pretty impressing particle physics library for Processing, which actually was the inspiration for this particle system toolbox in Matlab. As a matter of fact, object oriented programming in Matlab is not really the fastest lane on the particle system highway; we are back at the good old days of some ten or twenty real-time particles. But – the main purpose of this toolbox has never been to develop state-of-the-art computer games; it was rather planned as an educational, interactive learning-by-doing playground, with the aim to understand the mechanical interactions (and maybe the mathematical background) of the particle system components. Have fun!