Physical behavior of deformable hair and clothes: What is common?

As computers become computationally more powerful, the gap between virtual and physical reality is continuously diminishing. Striving for increased accuracy, computer simulations are becoming more and more specialized by the day - but are less capable of generalization. There is currently no comprehensive physically-based simulation approach for real-time animation of deformable objects within one unique framework. The first step required to tackle this challenge is to investigate invariant aspects in the correlation between dynamic behavior and physical properties of objects with different shape and consistency. In this paper we discuss the mechanical behavior of deformable one-dimensional rods and two-dimensional surfaces: hair and clothes.