Emulsion Explorer in VR

Enter the world of drops of oil (orange) in an environment where they can join up if they collide with each other or can be split apart if they collide with non-oil drops (green) which can be re-imagined as being the impellers of a mixer. It is a fascinating and beautiful world.

Like so much of WebVR it is currently bleeding edge and works only on special versions of Chrome and Firefox. Later this year the standard Chrome, Firefox and Edge will handle WebVR natively. The app works with the HTC Vive and the Oculus Touch, using the gui.datVR tool for menu items.

Instructions are below.

The basic need is to be able to fly around the box to get whatever view you want to see. Just look where you want to go and press a trigger - one takes you forward, the other takes you in reverse. Using point, click/slide with the menus you can pause/resume and change settings.

The Join and Split probabilities are used "live", the others require a restart:

• N Drops is the Number of particles in the simulation, from 10 to 500
• Room Size is from 10 to 30
• % Emulsion controls the number of (orange) particles, from 0 to 100%.
• P(Split) is the probability of a collision Splitting the emulsion particles, from 0 to 0.25. Keep it low or things get out of hand.
• P(Join) is the probability of two emulsion drops Joining on contact, from 0 to 1.

The physics is of "soft" interacting spheres rather than hard collisions. The walls of the room are visual bounding boxes to a "wrap-around" simulation. For example, if the particle arrives at a left-hand wall it will pass through and emerge at the equivalent spot on the right-hand wall. It seems strange at first, but by removing the rebounds at the walls we can focus on the emulsion physics rather than wall effects.