David.li Web Toys

What it is

David.li Web Toys is a portfolio page: a white grid of twelve picture tiles, each a rendered still of something squishy, swirling or googly-eyed, with a caption under it and one line at the bottom about making interactive playthings with math, sound, code and squishiness. Six tiles open toys on the site itself: Fluid Paint, Fluid Particles, Vortex Spheres, Volumetric Particle Flow, Fourier Image Filtering and Ocean Wave Simulation. The other six go elsewhere, three to a large company's online arts platform and three to a TV network's site.

How to play

Click a tile. We opened Fluid Particles: a wireframe box where you first draw blocks of fluid on the walls, with a particle density slider at 30720, then press start and the blocks become a slab of blue beads that slumps and sloshes under gravity in real time. Drag rotates the camera, scroll zooms, moving the mouse pushes the particles, and sliders for fluidity and speed are there to change how it pours. Edit takes you back to the box.

What makes it different

The one we opened is a real-time physics simulation running in a browser tab, presented as a toy rather than a demo, and the captions suggest its neighbors are the same. There is no walkthrough and no score, just a few control hints, a box of water and your cursor. The hub is the right link because it lets you pick: paint that flows, spheres in a vortex, an ocean surface, a Fourier image filter.

Why it is on Bored

Half of Visual toys is cursor art, and this is the page where the cursor pushes actual simulated water. It is the deep end of the category: nothing to learn, everything to poke, the thing you open to show someone what a browser can do now.

Tips

• Start with Fluid Particles, draw one big block and press start
• Turn speed down to watch the slosh in slow motion
• Scroll in close, the individual beads are the show
• Three tiles link out to a TV network over plain http, so they may not open everywhere

FAQ