Experiments with the 1D Wave Equation

These are flash mock-ups of what will hopefully become larger interactive art works. Click on a trapezoidal tile to activate it. Rapidly clicking will increase the activation.

Explanation: These animations are iteratively solving a discrete approximation to the 1D wave equation. The initial conditions are quiescent. Clicking a tile increases the value at that discrete point, which then propagates with wavelike behavior, including reflections from the endpoints. This behaves similarly (hopefully) to a stretched slinky or water in a narrow bathtub, but with light instead of physical displacement. I think it's nicely organic, which can be challenging to do digitally.

This example is like that above, but with the following changes:

Less damping (0.98 instead 0.95)
Neumann boundary conditions instead of Dirichlet (though I'm not sure I can tell the difference!)
Different colormap (blue for negative values)

These animations were generated entirely from open-source software using the Ming scripting package. Thanks to Gaz for helpful examples.

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