Addition/Subtraction from flight404 on Vimeo.

Older Magnetosphere/Turbulence/Nebula render from flight404 on Vimeo.

Robert Hodgin is a Coder/Artist living in San Francisco and a founding partner of the Barbarian Group where he worked until late 2009. Robert’s work goes from simple 2D data visualizations to 3D terrain simulations. His about page states that he has interstes in theoretical physics, particle engines and audio visualizations. Seems like a pretty intelligent guy to me.

The first video above is a field simulation Robert created as an exercise to learn more about C++ vectors and lists. I really don’t know what that means. Here’s an excerpt from his explanation: “It involves 20,000 particles which react to external forces and can be reborn locally if they should happen to stray too far. Into this mess of particles, you can place either an attractive force (gravity) or a repulsive force (orbital). The attractive forces pull every particle towards it based on the laws of gravitation. The repulsive forces spin either clockwise or counterclockwise and any particles nearby would be thrown away from the center of the rotating force.” All in all it makes for a really interesting abstract video. Make sure you watch it in HD even though it takes some time to load. The second video is an audio simulation called Turbulence he created that is simply mesmerizing. You can see more of his work on his site.