Home▸Animals & Their World▸Jerboa Dune Hop Lab (2D)

🐭 Jerboa Dune Hop Lab (2D)

A colony of jerboas hops between desert food patches on solved projectile arcs — wind drift, spatial memory and per-hop launch energy all feed back into where each hop actually lands.

Animals & Their World2DModerate60 FPS📱 Mobile-adapted⇄ 3D version

This 2D companion swaps the 3D scene's orbiting camera for the underlying biomechanics: each hop is a projectile arc solved directly from the horizontal distance and a duration that scales with it, wind is a real acceleration applied mid-flight so hops can overshoot or undershoot a patch, and "dune memory" sets the odds of targeting the nearest known patch instead of a random one — colony-wide hop synchrony and foraging progress both fall out of that physics rather than being scripted.

⚙ Under the hood

Ballistic hop-arc model: v_x=d/T, v_y0=Δelevation/T+½gT, with a constant wind acceleration during flight and a memory-weighted greedy/random patch-targeting rule.

jerboa locomotionprojectile motiondune navigationforaging behavior

2D · HTML5 Canvas 2D · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install