Liquid Layers Particle Simulator

There’s nowhere better to start than at the beginning. So I was thinking about what I should post about first and as I was procrastinating looking at an old favorite BoingBoing I saw something fun. Liquid Layers.

It’s not a new concept — I remember a demo of something similar when the accelerometer was first introduced in a MacBook— but it is nicely done and all web based, so it’s always up-to-date. There are a number of attributes you can control and you can also hide the controls. I couldn’t see a way to bring them back except for reloading the page, but then all your changes are lost.

There doesn’t seem to be a way to save the attributes as a set, so if you make something you like the behavior of you might need to make some screenshots.

Playing around with Liquid Layers particle simulation.

Here’s the caveat: it doesn’t look as good if you can see your cursor making the particles move around. To make it look like it’s organic, you have to hide your cursor. In a rare moment I couldn’t remember what could do that. On a Mac there are things like Cursorseror and good old BetterTouchTool. If you have a fancy screen recorder it may have that feature built in.
In BetterTouchTool I set up a keystroke to hide it. Press record in your screen recording software and splash away. I might use this in a music video as a special effect.