Real-time ferrofluid ยท WebGL2
A pool of liquid magnet that reaches for your hand. Bring the pointer close and it grows thorns. Hold, and it climbs into a crown. Let go, and it melts back into a mirror.
This browser cannot run WebGL2, so here is the fluid as a still. Open the page in a current browser to play with it.
Keyboard: arrow keys move the magnet, hold Space to power it, S splashes, P pulses the field, R starts over.
Every spike site reads the magnet's field where it sits. Below the critical field, 9 mT here, surface tension wins and the pool stays glassy flat. Above it, the spike rises with the square root of the extra field, the same shape the real instability takes.
The sites sit on a golden-angle spiral, which packs them in the near-hexagonal pattern real ferrofluid settles into. Each one is a damped spring, so spikes overshoot, lean toward the magnet and jiggle as they melt.
The surface is rebuilt on the graphics card every frame, one point per pixel of a dense grid, and lit only by reflections of a studio drawn in code: overhead softbox, tall strips, one warm accent. That is where the knife-edge highlights come from.
A ferrofluid is oil full of tiny magnetic particles. In a strong enough field the flat surface becomes unstable and breaks into a regular pattern of peaks, because peaks let the field lines pass through more fluid. The simulation keeps a critical field: below it the pool stays flat, above it every spike rises with the square root of the extra field.
Yes. Field strength is computed from the magnet model at every spike and the highest value is shown. Spike count is the number of spikes taller than about 1.4 mm, peak height is the tallest point of the pool in millimetres, and frames per second is measured in your browser.
Yes. It runs on WebGL2, which every current phone and desktop browser supports. It uses a lighter surface grid on small screens, lowers its own resolution when frames run long and stops drawing when it is off screen.
Yes. Ferro is a website template from Apex Flow Digital. You get this page, the engine source and one config file for the colours, the magnet strength and the spike pattern. Upload the folder to any static host.