Although graphics in 3D computer games has gone really far in the last decade or so, the water in most of them does not look very real — especially when you throw a couple of solid objects into it.

Now, a new fluid simulation algorithm, called "Position Based Fluids" (PBD) makes it look easy, with water bouncing off objects in a startlingly realistic fashion.

"In fluid simulation, enforcing incompressibility is crucial for realism; it is also computationally expensive. (...) By formulating and solving a set of positional constraints that enforce constant density, our method allows similar incompressibility and convergence to modern smoothed particle hydrodynamic (SPH) solvers, but inherits the stability of the geometric, position based dynamics method, allowing large time steps suitable for real-time applications," explain NVIDIA's Miles Macklin and Matthias Müller-Fischer.

If you're interested in how the technology works, the entire paper is available as a PDF, here. We'll just marvel at the water bouncing off that rabbit for a couple more minutes and hope to see this technology in games as soon as possible.

Image courtesy of YouTube/Miles Macklin