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Show HN: Interactive physics simulations I built while teaching my daughter (projectlumen.app)

87 points by anticlickwise ↗ HN
I started teaching my daughter physics by showing her how things actually work - plucking guitar strings to explain vibration, mixing paints to understand light, dropping objects to see gravity in action.

She learned so much faster through hands-on exploration than through books or videos. That's when I realized: what if I could recreate these physical experiments as interactive simulations?

Lumen is the result - an interactive physics playground covering sound, light, motion, life, and mechanics. Each module lets you manipulate variables in real-time and see/hear the results immediately.

Try it: https://www.projectlumen.app/

15 comments

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tetris11
This is pretty nice! I was quite impressed with the colour mixing one in particular

(At the same time I was reminded a bit by the subtext of the web series Don't Hug Me I'm Scared, especially when pumping the heart to deliver body's needed cargo, like aspic and white sauce -- but that's just my brainrot showing)

I can imagine this being pretty fun on a tablet

spuz
Not sure if it's just Firefox, but a lot of things seem to be rendering incorrectly and very slowly for me. The text for the descriptions is very small compared to the rest of the text which makes it kind of hard to read. Also, on the Spectrum demo, the prism is displayed up and to the left of the light rays. After a few minutes the pages just grind to a halt so I can't really explore the rest.
thimkerbell
Extra points if its homepage can offer informative 80-character descriptions. (What is the term for this (suggested) web design?)
gfaure
I wish it were possible to link to a particular page (e.g. the optics simulation).
jastanton
Love this, simulations are great. My nit pick is around how fast these animations are. You blink and you miss it. I can imagine children having more difficult time with this than myself as an adult. (For context I started with the sound animations: The Invisible Dance -- Shape the Wave & The Journey)
admiralrohan
Looking great. Having some context on the pages would be great, I can understand the grass-rabbit-fox dynamics but not clear with the the rest of the simulations.

And you can persist the page in query param. So someone can directly sent people to particular simulation with data.

mncharity
Two quick errata: In Sound / Biology, a control inversion: low pitch (slider and sound) animates blue short hairs, and high pitch animates long red. In the windtunnel > Wing, lift is reported but the airstream remains undeflected.[1]

[1] randomly, fwiw, I've used cloud deck slicing to illustrate downdraft, eg https://imgur.com/4hhZ7zq https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HIddtgGzDE . Or perhaps moments of "yoink" like... err, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfY5ZQDzC5s&t=154s .

rajkumar14
Unrelated to the question you posted, but how are you testing these PCBs? Specifically, are you using any software architecture for data logging and running tests?