Oliver Mattos

The web is such a great platform, but there are still things it can't do, and one of them is support for decent graphics without flash. HTML 5, the next version of the html the web is written in, goes some way to address this. With HTML5 you can do pretty much anything you like with 2D graphics by using the new <CANVAS> tag.

The problem is I hate limits, and therefore uncontent with my new 2D canvas, I want more! So I've been fiddling with software 3D rendering inside javascript.

Here's a poem I've liked for many years, and when I found out
that not one of the billions of web pages on the internet include
even a reference to the poem I decided to publish it here for safe keeping.
(note I can't be sure of the copyright status of the poem, but feel free to
contact me if you are the rightful owner)

The assignment: Make a computer program to simulate the movement of a pendulum.

Now, while to the laziest of you, that might just be typing y=sin(x) into Matlab, I decided to take it a few steps further.

As with any problem, I wanted to generalise the solution as much as possible, so I could re-use it for other things. In this case, I realized simulating a pendulum is just a simple subset of simulating any object. Therefore, I made a general physics simulator.