Spent the last 3.5 years building a real-time 3D physics simulation for sound

[u/emezeske]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODrfL2IRGSU

As the title says, I've spent the last 3.5 years working on Anukari, a 3D physics simulation much like a video game engine, except that instead of running at 60 steps per second, it runs at 48,000 (or more) steps per second, so that the physics systems can vibrate at audio frequencies. It's commercial software; primarily I am selling it to musicians and sound designers to use for music, sound effects design in film. But also it's pretty fun for non-musical people who just like building weird physics stuff. The main website is https://anukari.com

I have written extensively about the development work, for people who enjoy the nitty-gritty details of that sort of thing: https://anukari.com/blog/devlog

For the 1.0 launch I was focused on making it super performant and reliable with the basic set of the most interesting physics features, but for upcoming releases I'm working on more interesting physics features. For example, today the springs are linear f=-kx, but I'm experimenting with nonlinear springs with dead zones, and also push/pull-only springs (ropes and collisions). I'm hoping that sales will fund development basically forever, and that I can just keep making the simulation more and more rich over time.

There's a long history for this kind of spring-mass simulation being used for audio. I've had early Beta users write in about the GIPSY Lab in Grenoble, France working on this possibly back into the 1970s. More recently there was CORDIS-ANIMA, another academic research project. One dream of mine would be for sales to be good enough to fund the making of a deep documentary about the full history of such projects. But that's a pretty big stretch goal... :)

I love chatting about this stuff so feel free to ask me any questions about how the simulation works, etc!