A number of years ago I had the privilege of visiting the lab of Professor Hiroshi Ishii at the MIT Media Lab. Luckily for me, that visit coincided with the awesome TRANSFORM project that was going on at that time.
In a nutshell, Transform is a dynamic shape display that move more than one thousand pins up and down in real-time to transform a tabletop into a dynamic tangible display.
To help with the project, I created a little on-line simulator. A code editor lets you vary the behavior of the simulated pins.
The examples I started with were some movements based on sine waves and, of course, some movements driven by the noise function. You can play with the simulator for yourself HERE.