Matchbox Simulator 🔥

Play it here: matchbox-simulator.vercel.app

I built this because I wanted to strike a match without actually burning my fingers. It started as a small matchbox-and-candle toy. It grew into a little fire lab where you can pull everyday things out of a cupboard and watch how each one reacts to an open flame.

What you can do

• Strike a match on the side of the box and light the candle.
• Open the cupboard and drag out household items to see how they behave near fire:
  • newspaper and cardboard burn quickly
  • a cotton rag smoulders
  • pine kindling takes a while to catch
  • a plastic bottle melts first and then burns
  • steel wool glows, and gets heavier as it burns because it's picking up oxygen
  • spilled rubbing alcohol burns with a faint blue flame
  • a deodorant can bursts once it gets too hot
  • cooking oil on the stove ignites at around 300 °C, and throwing water on it causes a steam explosion (please never try this in a real kitchen)
  • baking soda smothers the flames
  • a handful of flour tossed into the air turns into a dust explosion
• Throw things around. Everything has a real mass in grams and falls under real gravity, and objects collide instead of passing through each other.

Why I made it

I like building small interactive things, and fire felt like a good excuse to learn real-time physics and 3D in the browser. It's also a safe way to show why you shouldn't put water on an oil fire.

Tech

• Three.js for rendering
• Rapier for rigid-body physics (1 unit = 1 cm, masses in grams)
• Vite for dev and build
• Hosted on Vercel

Running it locally

You'll need Node 20 or newer.

git clone https://github.com/maitranilim/matchbox-simulator.git
cd matchbox-simulator
npm install
npm run dev

To make a production build, run npm run build. The output goes to dist/.

A word on safety

This is a simulation. The chemistry is simplified to make it fun and roughly believable, and it isn't a safety guide. Please don't recreate any of it at home.

Author

Made by Nishan (@maitranilim).