This reminds me of one of those things you buy in the gift shop of a science museum, with five silver sphere suspended from monofilament line, such that lifting the end one and letting it swing down and crash into the second causes the one at the far end to swing up, with no perceptible motion of the intervening spheres.
See the similarity?
Are you graphics skills up to making something like that? You'd have to fudge the physics (sometimes all the spheres fuse to form one new sphere on the left), but it could be nifty.
(Please post in alt.hackers if you do anything along these lines.)