Set off an eruption, divert the lava flow, wait for the cones to grow, and feel how the volcano builds itself.
Volcano Simulator was designed first for museums and science centres that want to give visitors something more than a video loop. It puts a live, physically simulated volcano on a touch table and lets anyone interact with it : open an eruptive crack, change the flow rate and the lava temperature, then watch a landscape form.
Everything is running in real time on GPU, the simulation is non-deterministic, you'll never get 2 times exactly the same result !
With a VR headset the same simulation becomes something else : you are standing in the lava field, a few metres from the vent !
The application runs on a homemade engine written specifically in 2013 for this project. the simulation lives on GPU memory, as a grid of stacked layers, stepped by OpenGL compute shaders, the renderer reads the buffers directly, for 0 latency and real-time lighting and tessellation.
The 2023 rebuild added real-time particles depth sort and ray tracing, for the most recent graphics cards !
Every playground can be rebuilt on another volcano from its digital elevation
model.
If you run a venue and this sounds like something for you,
get in touch !
A GPU fluid solver for the lava rivers, and a PBR renderer for the Reunion Island landscapes !
