Tendrils is an interactive experiment for the Max Cooper on the Emergence project that lets you play with thousands of dancing particles in real time. Visually it’s like a living painting of tendrils and fluid forms that spontaneously emerge and vanish. What’s cool is that it isn’t a pre-rendered animation; it’s an emergent particle system driven by simple rules, so all those intricate shapes come from the particles influencing each other (think a DIY fluid simulation in motion). The project doubles as a music visualizer and even hooks into your webcam/mic, so motion or sound in your room will ripple through the virtual “fluid”, making the experience come alive.

Behind the scenes, developer epok.tech (Eoghan O’Keeffe) engineered Tendrils with some clever tech under the hood. All the particle physics run on the GPU, which means the demo can push thousands of particles smoothly in the browser. Each particle stores its velocity into a shared texture field and reads from it in turn, a feedback loop technique inspired by fluid dynamics research. This approach spawns those organic shapes without any hand-crafted keyframe animations. The shader code and system design are nicely modular too. If you're interested in further details, you can visit this project's in-depth overview.

If you want to explore Tendrils yourself, it’s just a click away. Open the demo in a modern browser and play around. There’s an on-screen edit panel with various settings and presets. And for the code-curious, the entire project is open-sourced. Eoghan is active online (find him on LinkedIn and on his site), so give him a follow if you like this kind of creative coding work.