Projects / Curiosity & experiments · Creative tools

Swirl Room

An oddly satisfying toy box of fluid, lava, sand and slime that runs in your browser.

Playable slice

Playable now on phone or desktop. The Terrarium world simulator inside it is the deepest part.

The Swirl Room fluid toy showing swirls of purple, yellow, blue and green ink on a black background, with a row of toy tabs along the bottom.
The fluid toy, with a tab bar for the other seven. Captured Oct 29, 2026.
State
Playable slice
Last change
Oct 9, 2026 · latest merge
Page last reviewed
Oct 29, 2026

The problem or experience

Sometimes you just want something to push around. Swirl Room is a set of tactile toys where the physics, graphics and sound are all generated live, with no libraries.

Who it's for

Anyone with a spare minute and a touchscreen or mouse, and people who like seeing how much can fit in one HTML file.

My contribution

It is my project. The whole app is one self-contained page, and the repository builds and deploys it to GitHub Pages.

What works today

  • Eight toys: fluid, lava, sand, cymatics, slime, domino, swing and pop.
  • Multi-touch works on phones, and keys 1 to 8 switch toys on desktop.
  • Terrarium is a sand-based world simulator with dozens of materials, save slots and share codes.

Limitations

  • The fluid toy uses WebGL2, so older devices may struggle.
  • I checked that the hosted page loads and renders. I haven't tested every toy on every device.

Evidence

How you can get involved

Found a toy that feels wrong?

  • Tell me which toy you'd keep and which you'd drop.
  • If you have an idea for a ninth toy, I'd like to hear it.
Write to me about Swirl Room