Carousel Slider Physics: Spring-Damper Snap & Drag Inertia

Behind every smooth image slider or carousel is a small piece of applied physics: drag momentum that decays under friction, and a spring that pulls the resting position back to the nearest slide. This simulator renders an 8-card 3D carousel you can grab and spin — release it and it keeps turning under real rotational inertia, then a critically-damped spring snaps it to the nearest slide exactly the way native scroll-snap and app carousels do. Friction, spring stiffness and damping ratio are all live controls, so you can watch the same ring swing from a bouncy underdamped wobble to an instant critical snap to a slow overdamped drift, with autoplay demonstrating the identical mechanism driving itself.