Here's a new movie of a tensegrity sphere, generated this afternoon using the new trick of writing image files from the OpenGL canvas.

The tensegrity itself is built by an algorithm that starts with a virtual scaffolding in the form of a geodesic sphere of a given frequency (Bucky Fuller term). Every edge of the scaffolding then gets a bar attached to it, and then all the bars are rotated on an axis through their middle and through the sphere center, just a few degrees.

Then the algorithm visits each of ends of these bars and strings cables between them in rings around the scaffold's vertexes, and also between rings to complete the structure. The geodesic sphere scaffold is then eliminated, leaving only the bars and cables, and then the physics makes it settle to a nearby radius.

Then I turn on gravity and let it fall to the ground. Each bar and each cable is only responsible for itself, and the remarkable liquid-like behavior is an emergent phenomenon of all these pieces together.

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