Talk about a hyperbolic title. How is this even remotely "realistic"?

It's nice, but there's a million animations just as awesome made every year. Are we going to post all of them here?

Agreed, I was a bit perplexed by that too. I do like it (because I hobby in After Effects myself) but it didn't strike me as especially realistic. I presume the TNW writer was referring to the pretty degradation of the colored smoke, but I couldn't help noticing the heavy use of blur and particle systems, especially as the material got more complex on screen.

It's a very fine piece of work; maybe the blog author just got a little carried away by his emotional response to it.

If you're worked on (or have seen) anything better, care to post a link?

Note: I'm not doubting you - I actually thought the video clip looked beautiful so I want to know what you mean when you imply it could have been done better.

guilty as charged...

Yes, let's! Or if there are too many, let's make a nice repository for beautiful videos.

It's "realistic" in the sense that the animation seems driven by music data input. He wired the graphics to respond to processed music signals and added some additional (random?) inputs.

Compare to this piece: http://vimeo.com/1755557

Very beautiful also, but much more composed and not primarily driven by music data.

I'm actually more impressed byt his one! You are right though, the one in the OP is heavily modulated by spectrographic data from the music. After effects include a crude plugin for this purpose, but the OP animation used a 3rd party one that is constrainable to a particular frequency window.

Apple's Motion is also very good in this area, including responding to MIDI which is a royal pain to achieve with AE - particularly annoying to me since I have several MIDI devices and would love to be able to generate keyframe data by twiddling knobs I already have. Ho hum...anyone know of dynamic midi resources for Javascript (ie not just passing a midi file to the audio driver)?

Heh I think it looks like paint explosions kind of like the Sony ad.

I would love to see a version with the motivational fortune cookies removed.

Yes, good point. And I wonder how it would look with other music.

I like the art, but your javascript (prototype.js) is throwing an "invalid array length" error.

Update-- In fact, the video ain't playin' (FF 3.013, Fedora 10 2.6.27.25-170.2.72.fc10.x86_64)

The video isn't playing with Firefox 3.0.10 on 32-bit Ubuntu 9.04 with Flash 9.0r31 and IcedTea (not sure what mechanism is being used to play the video), either.

There's nothing wrong with grabbing random snippets from the Oblique Strategies list. :(

The article asks for this to be turned into an iTunes visualization plugin. In general I don't think fluid dynamics like that can be done in realtime. Maybe with a GPU.

There is a nice demo in Nvidia's Cuda SDK:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh2q_p6hQEo

Yes, I like that CUDA stuff. However I think you need their Tesla engine for the most impressive eye candy, which runs about $2000 last time I looked. Of course, this time next year etc. etc.

This particular demo runs on Macbook Pro with Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uoVRs_zLn8

Not so smooth as on the desktop GPU, but even not top-of-line gaming card for few hundred bucks will give you very impressive performance.

And even with just CPU you can do pretty nice things:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlFAzXeCB80

Sure, but look at that frame rate. Don't get me wrong, I think we're in a golden age of computer graphics, but that last 5% o performance is still pricey.

Maybe it's time to start benchmarking physics simulations though, just like the utah teapot was/is the 'hello world' of the 3d modelling/raytracing world for so long.

The author has already separated the strings and piano intruments into different tracks, So this wouldn't work as an itunes/milkdrop plugin, where you only have one flattened track.

Oooh, what is that word again... mesmerizing

I'm sticking with Pixar movies.

can somebody make this into a Leopard screensaver?

Not in the short term. Smoke and suchlike very computationally intensive to simulate well. I threw together a very rough version of this in After Effects after reading the authors comments on the TNW page (by very rough I mean just loading a bunch of similar plugins and specifying crude parameters) in order to get an idea of how long it might take to render 3 minutes' worth, the result being 'several hours' on a fairly decent quad core machine - and clearly the author has put in a good deal more work on this.

Now you could offload a lot of this work to the GPU with some planning, and employ numerous little tricks and dare-i-say-it hacks, but I'd say the earliest you'll see this running in real time is when the 2015 32-core Mac Pro hits the streets.

edit: I'm being pessimistic. 2012 is more likely.