The awesome animation below is actually the recorded output of a real-time #Javascript-powered physics engine. There has been quite a lof of progress in this field lately using technologies like #canvas and #WebGL, here are some recent developments:

The “dragable/tearable cloth” demo comes from lonely-pixel.com. Play with it live and get the code here http://bit.ly/15wyK0F There are more demos on the developer’s website, like the above-pictured “ball curve collision” http://bit.ly/1078otN (balls fall through the curves which you can re-arrange as you like :))

Then we go to Verlet-js http://bit.ly/XY0okC a simple (according to SubProtocol, the developer) Verlet integration physics engine written in Javascript by. Check out the “spider” demo
http://bit.ly/ZGWIy6 where you can push a spider around on it’s web (yes, the spider moves around on it’s own as well :))

Finally, CoffeePhysics (http://bit.ly/11XpGxF) by +Justin Windle. Yes, every bubble there moves around in a frantic manner :)  More experiments by Justin here http://bit.ly/XYfjeJ