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Show HN: I was curious about spherical helix, ended up making this visualization

visualrambling.space

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Re: Show HN: I was curious about spherical helix, ended up making this visualization

#41
post #24

Awesome visualizations. The part that I was expecting to see but didn't: how can you move at a constant speed? For the original purpose of positioning objects along a path, it doesn't matter. But when moving, you can see it's moving much more slowly at the beginning and end (mostly determined by the radius). What if I want it to travel at a constant rate? Or even apply an easing function to the speed? I'm sure there'…

For constant speed you need a so-called “Euclidean parameterization” where the t value is proportional to s, the Euclidean distance traveled (and thus no matter the value of t, if you add some dt it always works out to the same ds). This is super commonly needed when animating motion along all sorts of curves, as you might guess.

Unfortunately, there’s usually no closed-form solution for it, so we have to do it numerically. And for doing that there’s in general no better way than at each t, binary/interpolation search a dt that roughly corresponds to the ds that you want (start with the previous dt, it’s likely a very good approximation).

In practice, you’d do that once and store the results, basically approximating the curve as a polyline of evenly-spaced points– at least assuming that the curve itself isn’t changing over time!

Re: Show HN: I was curious about spherical helix, ended up making this visualization

#42
post #26

Really love this project, I only have small little UX nitpick: as lefthanded person it is quite cumbersome to tap right side of screen. Go to solution is to navigate using swiping which is ambidexterous.

As a left-handed person I have no problem holding the phone in my right hand when I need to use UI on that side of the screen. Though I do prefer phones on the small side.

Re: Show HN: I was curious about spherical helix, ended up making this visualization

#44

Thanks. My useful feedback is that navigation violated my expectations. I was in mobile FWIW. I didn't know what to do so I started to scroll. My touch to the screen kicked into the next pane so I'm like "oh, okay". I happened to touch the right side so I thought that advanced it and so when I later clicked an extra time unintentionally, I tried to click the left side to go back (note that people who read right to le…

There are instructions on the first slide. I think adding a secondary swipe mechanic would be nice tho (although I prefer the tap), as that's how these "card stack" interfaces are usually navigated in social media apps.

Oh, you're right. Small and at the bottom. I guess I tried to scroll before my eyes got there. Thanks for pointing out my error.

Re: Show HN: I was curious about spherical helix, ended up making this visualization

#47
post #24

Awesome visualizations. The part that I was expecting to see but didn't: how can you move at a constant speed? For the original purpose of positioning objects along a path, it doesn't matter. But when moving, you can see it's moving much more slowly at the beginning and end (mostly determined by the radius). What if I want it to travel at a constant rate? Or even apply an easing function to the speed? I'm sure there'…

The instinct to sort of slow t is right, as the governing functions are maintaining angular velocity with respect to t but scaling radius also with respect to t.

It’s sort of like an Archimedean spiral. So, yeah, if you parameterize velocity and make that constant, you’re in better shape. Note that the radius starts at zero, though, so something is going to have to deal with limits.

A simpler path following approximation (e.g., for a game) might be to just give an iterative system path and tangent targets with respect to Z and then provide an iterative constraint on velocity with some sort of basic tweening (e.g., new = a * old + (1 - a) * target). Then just drag the thing along Z, like bead toys for toddlers.

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