Fluid Ping Pong Uses HTML5 and a Realistic Fluid Dynamics Simulation

Browsers may still be used mostly to check Facebook and watch YouTube videos, but they're capable of so much more. With a big focus on performance and technologies such as HTML5, WebGL and others making use of the newfound speed in browsers, the limit is fast becoming developers' imagination.

One popular way of showing off what browsers are capable of is, as always, games. Everyone loves games and even simple-looking games can be quite taxing.

It doesn't get any simpler than Pong, the first electronic game that people have heard about.

Yet, decades after it was invented, there still are people doing interesting things with the concept and no, this isn't about Atari's HTML5 reimagining of the game.

Fluid Ping Pong is a HTML5 game that sort of looks like Pong but is anything but. The gimmick is that it relies on fluid dynamics to push the ball around, making for a completely different game.

You can push a stream of "fluid" to turn the ball around without touching it or you can suck in the ball for a precision strike.

The best part is, though it doesn't really make much of a difference in the game, that the physics are quite realistic and a simulation of the Navier-Stokes equations for fluid dynamics.

"This is a demonstration of the possibilities that HTML5/browsers have to offer inspired by the wonderful work done by Steve Taylor (Plasma Pong)," the game's developer Anirudh Joshi wrote.

"It renders a ping pong game interacting with a full-color real-time fluid simulation at 60 FPS," he added in his description of the game.

"It utilizes the algorithm created by Jos Stam (Real-Time Fluid Dynamics for Games), monochrome dynamics implemented by Oliver Hunt (Oliver's simple fluid dynamics simulator), amended with RJ Marsan's RGB example (Plasma Pong Android by RJ Marsan) and a little special sauce by yours truly," he explained.

The game works in Firefox and Chrome, most likely in other modern browsers as well, and there's even a Chrome app for it.