Emil Ernerfeldt the creator of Phun takes a break to talk 2D physics with Knitware’s Doc Rogers.
Doc: Hello Emil, thankyou for taking some time to talk to the Knitware team, I guess you must be pretty busy.
Hello! I have been quite busy since I put the video on YouTube three weeks ago, but I try to take the time to dialog with my new found fans!
Doc: I have to say we were all blown away by Phun and thought it was a great piece of programming. If someone hasn’t seen the site or application before how would you describe it?
I have found that it’s very hard to describe Phun to somebody who has never seen anything like it before. Think of it like a paint application, only anything you paint comes alive. It allows you to quickly create mechanical contraptions, such as cars, and then interact with them. Like virtual Meccano or Lego.
Doc: I’ve seen a lot of sites mention Phun (Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon), the feedback has all been really positive, were you surprised by the level of interest?
I had seen similar videos (like MIT sketching above) and so I knew the interest for Phun would be large. But I didn’t expect it to become so big so fast, and I certainly didn’t expect the enormous response I got!
The day after the video was released I started getting a lot of very positive e-mail, and YouTube has over 200 fan made Phun videos by now. A lot of those videos contains things I would never had thought of - and I really enjoy seeing what people can come up with using Phun.
Doc: To someone who knows very little about programming and indeed physics it looks pretty complicated to make. Can you explain how you go about creating something like this, how long it takes and what software you use?
I have spent about six months developing the software from the ground up as my master thesis in computing science. It’s written in C++ and was coded in Microsoft Visual Studio. What I started with was the console and the simple scripting language that saves settings and scenes. From that I added one feature at the time - drawing polygons, collision detection, collision response, a GUI, etc. All and all Phun is about 30000 lines of code.
Doc: Ok so what’s next for you? any plans for Phun2 or maybe something new?
I’m going to write my thesis on Phun and graduate, but I am at the moment looking for funding to keep developing the software and keep it free. Exactly what the future brings for Phun is quite unclear, but my hope is to be able to develop it further, and get more people to help me. I believe Phun has great potential both as entertainment and as a learning tool.
Doc: Thankyou Emil, the Knitware team wishes you all the best with Phun and all your future projects.
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