Browserfountain – playing with Canvas particles

Last week I attended the great Creative JavaScript training by Seb Lee Delisle. One of the things we talked about were simple particle systems using canvas with simulated physics. I was pretty blown away to see how easy that is, especially when you fake the physics rather than using the real formulas.

One of my experiments I just uploaded to Mozilla’s Demo Studio, the Browser fountain (source code on GitHub).

Here’s what it looks like on YouTube:

The performance is pretty amazing, although I am doing a few things that make me cringe while writing them if you approach something like that like you approach building production web sites. Sometimes it makes sense to let go, I guess.

I am currently in discussion with Seb if he is OK for me to write a simple tutorial on particles, so let’s see if that goes ahead.