Hyper-realistic sand with WebGL2

alex_duf | 21 hours ago

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

leobuskin | 21 hours ago

It doesn’t in my case, I see some weird animation, everything disappears, “pour” button again. Shaking or any other movement doesn’t help. Latest chrome on iOS

dylanowen | 21 hours ago

The sand is pouring onto the phone screen so if your phone is tilted or upside down it looks illogical

nomel | 18 hours ago

Thank you! I was looking at it while lying sideways and thought it was completely broken. But, it's just hyper-realistic. ;)

AndrewSwift | 20 hours ago

Works for me in Safari — iPhone 17 Pro, all up to date

Angostura | 46 minutes ago

And on this iPhone 13 mini

ChrisMarshallNY | 20 hours ago

It helps, if you lock orientation on the phone.

Whenever the phone detects an orientation change, it resets the layout.

mywittyname | 19 hours ago

Do you have shake as undo still enabled? It's one of the most annoying features in iOS.

intrasight | 16 hours ago

Because if you turn it upside down, the sand pours out. Think of it as if you have sand in a rectangular tray with no lid.

It also responds to touch, which I didn't know until the third time I played with it.

winkelmann | 15 hours ago

It took me a while to realize this isn't a falling sand (Powder Toy) type game. The phone has to lay flat, i.e. with the screen facing up.

alex_duf | 3 hours ago

It can lay flat, but it's a lot more fun to tip it! the sand "falls" off the screen

theowaway213456 | 20 hours ago

I think it responds to tilting, not shaking?

alex_duf | 3 hours ago

on my it does some sort of fluid simulation when I shake it

mattlondon | 20 hours ago

Nothing happens on my android phone

jarek83 | 19 hours ago

I had that too on brave then realized that brave locks all permissions. It worked as expected in chrome

andai | 13 hours ago

Ok in Firefox on Android I got the tilting to work. Super cool! No sound though.

dyauspitr | 19 hours ago

Maybe it’s too much for my iPhone 13 or something, I can see it but it’s all choppy and slow

flykespice | 17 hours ago

The demo runs like a slideshow on my humble budget android phone from 2021

salad-tycoon | 17 hours ago

Don’t worry, it runs like a flip picture motion book on an iPad a16 (current gen. Base model iPad).

flykespice | 17 hours ago

Probably vibecoded from looking at the menu UI.

kinduff | 17 hours ago

I tried shaking the browser window lol

christkv | 21 hours ago

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

techpression | 21 hours ago

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

zamalek | 20 hours ago

What do you mean "stuck in the air?" It's top down.

techpression | 20 hours ago

They don’t move, not even when pressing with your finger, “stuck on the ground” then, it’s the same outcome.

vfosnar | 20 hours ago

didnt encounter the stucking issue but agree with the overerall point, the sand gets a sort of 'build-up pressure and bounce back' effect which breaks the immersiveness for me, otherwise cool

arm32 | 20 hours ago

This is very fun to play with.

hamidmohaqeq | 20 hours ago

This is really cool and give a realistic sense

amunozo | 20 hours ago

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

nout | 20 hours ago

This is annoying to clean up exactly like real sand.

bovermyer | 18 hours ago

Yeah, it's coarse, and it really gets everywhere.

customguy | 20 hours ago

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

SamBam | 18 hours ago

Such a curious effect, although it makes sense given that each particle is probably being positioned in absolute coordinates with respect to the screen boundaries. So each grain gets bigger but stays in place.

wigster | 20 hours ago

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

refactor_master | 4 hours ago

Yeah, the sand looks more like a fine sequence of stop-motion frames than physics based sand.

smusamashah | 19 hours ago

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.

catapart | 19 hours ago

They have different characteristics, too. The red, desert sand is clumpier than the beach sand, for instance.

jarjoura | 19 hours ago

yup, I would just remove the sound effect completely.

cheapcheerful | 19 hours ago

Wow man, very cool.

smusamashah | 19 hours ago

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

hjun1052 | 2 hours ago

Wish it had a license. Would’ve loved to add some ants to this.

kccqzy | 19 hours ago

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.

Razengan | 19 hours ago

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

Rexxar | 10 hours ago

I think you should be aware of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection

Razengan | 7 hours ago

Did the temptation never cross your neurons?

animuchan | 2 hours ago

Your comment got me thinking: why didn't I?

(Because I didn't draw anything really, some formless lines.)

Is this the fault of consumerism, where we anticipate the penis to come pre-drawn for our immediate gratification?

Or have we witnessed internalized self-censorship?

Or lowered testosterone from work-related stress?

One tiny penis, left undrawn, raised so many questions.

emilfihlman | 19 hours ago

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!

tgtweak | 19 hours ago

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

samiv | 19 hours ago

Cue the whines about not using WebGPU.

asaddhamani | 19 hours ago

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

mashally | 18 hours ago

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

lloydatkinson | 18 hours ago

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?

Wowfunhappy | 9 hours ago

Huh? It ran great on my iPhone 13.

hvvivek | 18 hours ago

this is super fun! well done

momojo | 18 hours ago

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"

Teladin | 18 hours ago

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

weitzj | 18 hours ago

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

itomato | 18 hours ago

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

lavendermon | 18 hours ago

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?

nkmnz | 18 hours ago

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

yipinwong | 17 hours ago

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

turadg | 17 hours ago

anyone who likes that should touch grass

https://grass.turadg.com/

bob1029 | 17 hours ago

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

evnp | 17 hours ago

Super loud sound warning, us parents and folks wearing headphones would really appreciate default sound off. Or at least a some indication to turn volume down before tapping "pour"

codingjinxx | 19 minutes ago

ya i opened this in class and i forgot to mute

matt3210 | 17 hours ago

Finally, the kind of sandbox we deserve

int32max | 16 hours ago

woah this is really well done

cat-whisperer | 16 hours ago

a full circle moment

hirako2000 | 14 hours ago

Handles double simultaneous taps n drags. Nice touch!

rybosome | 14 hours ago

I notice that different types of sand sound different - the timbre of the sand falling onto the table and shuffling around is noticeably different between the various types. I was curious if the differences in the sand were being physically modeled to synthesize sound.

It’s a physics-based generation but the simulation model is somewhat limited; essentially a few parameters that vary between the sand types, some randomization, and responsiveness to flow rate. Still, it’s highly effective; something like the fine, silty desert sand is noticeably brighter and sounds more like a hiss as it pours and flows than the rocky volcanic sand.

Very cool effect, this is joyful to play with.

andai | 13 hours ago

Probably a bug, but the audio was just distorted noise without end.

iberator | 12 hours ago

10 fps on merely 3 years old Android phone.

ThePinion | 12 hours ago

It's quite amazing. I've found if you simply give the LLM a slight hint that things should be optimized for all devices, you can get tenfold performance of the original one-shot. But I think this is still a secret tactic because none of these have been optimized in the slightest.

Originally I felt eh maybe you have to have an old coder's mind to tell the LLM how to keep things optimized... But yeah nah not anymore, you just tell it to optimize.

monster_truck | 12 hours ago

This does not seem very realistic at all. Cool slop I guess,

You are managing to use my GPU so inefficiently that the transient spikes are bumping my speakers out of standby

bahmboo | 4 hours ago

Love it. Want it on my actual pixel home screen

patrick_rtk | 2 hours ago

very nice !

Faint | 52 minutes ago

Smooth on OnePlus 13. Some flickering on the side the sand falls hard to. Still very nice.