Interactive physics simulations I built while teaching my daughter
Details
- External ID
- 46675669
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Interactive physics simulations I built while teaching my daughter
- Website domain
- projectlumen.app
- Launched
- Jan. 19, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 87
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8847167325428195
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
I started teaching my daughter physics by showing her how things actually work - plucking guitar strings to explain vibration, mixing paints to understand light, dropping objects to see gravity in action.She learned so much faster through hands-on exploration than through books or videos. That's when I realized: what if I could recreate these physical experiments as interactive simulations?Lumen is the result - an interactive physics playground covering sound, light, motion, life, and mechanics. Each module lets you manipulate variables in real-time and see/hear the results immediately.Try it: https://www.projectlumen.app/
Enrichment
- Theme
- interactive simulations and creative experiments
- Vertical
- Education
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Prosumer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- interactive physics simulations for teaching
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes Educational physics widgets in React using canvas or framer-motion (springs, pendulums, wave simulations) are standard textbook algorithms readily generated by AI coding assistants.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: PhET simulations (phet.colorado.edu), Typing Club, Keybr, Monkeytype
Concerns raised: Animations too fast, hard to follow, Performance issues and rendering errors in Firefox, Physics not accurate (control inversion in Sound/Biology, airstream deflection in wing simulation), Requires Google account login by default, Text too small and hard to read
Feature requests: Slow down animations, Persist page selection in URL query parameters for direct linking, Add context/descriptions for each simulation, Open source the code
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 76 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #21 of 77 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 68 days after the earliest competitor.
- A gravity simulator where forces propagate at the speed of light · hn · 2026-09-03 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Nina's Little Universe · ph · 2026-09-18 · 55 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Gravity · hn · 2026-06-09 · 217 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- An interactive physics simulator with 1000’s of balls, in your terminal · hn · 2026-01-19 · 75 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- 2D Coulomb Gas Simulator · hn · 2026-02-16 · 44 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- electromagnetism · github · 2026-09-28 · 48 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Higher-dimensional lattices unfolded into the 2D plane · hn · 2026-08-06 · 18 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Wyrm · hn · 2026-07-09 · 81 upvotes · similarity 0.37
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
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