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This article was published on July 27, 2015

Stop working! Play with this interactive tentacle monster instead


Stop working! Play with this interactive tentacle monster instead

Searching for tentacles on the internet is…uh…well, let’s just say it can flag up some pretty way out stuff. Good work, Japan! But this is some safe-for-work, tentacle-related entertainment.

Muscular Hydrostats – which should be the name of a math rock band – is a simulation that lets you mess with a tentacled squid-like creature, sending it barrelling around your browser.

Tentacle-controls

Once you’ve got bored with playing with the default monster, you can open up the control panel and screw with the parameters, including head size, tentacle length and gravity.

If you’re a dev, you can play even more by grabbing the code from GitHub and making your own take on this.

Under the hood, the simulation uses sketch.js and dat.GUI. It’s designed to demonstrate the principle of inverse kinematics, equations that determine how a robot or animated character should move.

But really, I’m writing about this because tentacles are cool. Not Japanese specialist magazine cool, though.

Muscular Hydrostats [GitHub]

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