Flat cylinder finding its round cross-section through isometric embedding in 3-space
A cylinder with flat (Euclidean) intrinsic geometry is meshed and embedded into R3 using a spring-and-charge network. The spring rest lengths encode the flat metric, so the system seeks an isometric embedding of the cylinder. A composite energy functional combines spring energy, shear and bending stiffness, and Coulomb repulsion between vertices.
The dynamics simulation uses a damped Newtonian integrator with per-vertex mass and drag. Since flat cylinders embed isometrically in R3 as standard round cylinders, the simulation converges to the expected circular cross-section shape.
Controls: Click and drag to orbit, scroll to zoom.
