13–15 March 2027
Thu–Sat · doors 10:00
last squish 23:00
The Bouncy Hall
Pier 9, Rotterdam (fictional)
socks mandatory, shoes optional
Jelly Ensemble · DJ Marshmallow · The Pneumatic Choir · Professor Pudding (keynote: “Is a bouncy castle architecture?”) · Mochi Mochi · Haribo Brutalism panel · Wobble & Daughters · the Inflatable Type Foundry · a very large beanbag
DragThrowStackDouble-click to pop
How tall can soft go? Drop letters, pile them onto the plinth, squish them into place. Height counts once the pile sits still for a second.
Each glyph is drawn once with Canvas2D in Bricolage Grotesque 800. Rust walks the alpha bitmap with marching squares, links crossings into closed loops, simplifies them with Douglas–Peucker and resamples to even spacing — outer rings and holes (the O keeps its O).
Müller et al. 2005. Every substep finds the best-fit rotation of the rest shape (a 2D polar decomposition is one atan2), blends in a volume-normalised linear transform, and pulls particles toward it. Stiffness is the “jelly ↔ rubber” slider.
An area constraint on the signed area of all rings keeps letters puffy when squashed and lets you inflate them. Push the pressure to the top and they protest. Double-click and they deflate like party balloons, then re-inflate.
Particles are tested against other glyphs with an even-odd inside test and nearest edge, pushed out with mass-split corrections and Coulomb friction. The poster’s info blocks are real rounded obstacles, sent to Rust as rects.
Six substeps per frame, positions read zero-copy from linear memory.
Rest-pose glyphs are ear-clipped once (holes bridged); the deforming mesh reads Rust positions each frame. WGSL draws a soft shadow, a thick ink outline as a miter strip, the fill with halftone and a squash-dependent gloss, then a lit rim.