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Now this will be a wishful thinking post, as far as I know this is not coming to Sansar but one can dream!

Imagine fluid water dynamics in your favourite virtual world…

Water that not only looks like water (which already looks great in SL) but also acts like it.
It flows and reacts with its surroundings.
Imagine digging a hole in your garden… with a trench to the river… and then the water flows from the river into the hole!

While landscaping your sim, you’d build a mountain, click the water icon and a big water drop hovers over your land, drop it and it will fall onto your land, streaming down, filling dents, surrounding hills and turning them into islands, following riverbeds, causing waterfalls and ending at the sea or a lake, adding the risk of it overflowing…

Can you imagine the fun you’ll have?
Building dikes, breaking them, seeing towns get flooded, making waterfalls, underground lakes, etc. etc.

Not to mention that certain things would float on water while others would sink.
You could sit in a little boat and actually see it float down the river, following a stream, without you doing anything, without scripts, without gadgets.

Depending on how well it is implicated, it could be used for serious scientific experiences!

And who knows… it could maybe even be used to recreate REAL rain in SL… countless little drops that fall down and slide down roofs…
But that is perhaps taking things too far.

The water might even react realistically to items… or people jumping in!
Check out this amazing video;

Back to earth.
I know, I know, this is all much more than the LL servers or our computers can handle at the moment.
Although the video is a few years old, even today this would cost even super computers quite some time to render.

Calculating 3D water effects, responses, reflections, ripples, behaviour in real time sounds like science fiction.

Or so I thought…

Twitter user Cube Republic read my tweet about the video above and shared a very interesting link with me.
There is an online demo called ‘WebGL Water‘ made by Evan Wallace, that shows a cube of water that reacts to touch and interaction in real time, in a browser!
Or as Mr. Wallace explains himself, it has; Raytraced reflections and refractions, Analytic ambient occlusion, Heightfield water simulation and Soft shadowsCaustics.

I think this is very impressive, sure not super realistic, but very close and I could already imagine it in our Berlin swimming pool.

Check out this video;

This is also rather old, but, as non-technical as I am, I can’t help wondering, if this can run in a browser… how far are we from seeing this on a large scale implemented in a virtual world like Sansar?

Webgl water