Nice work and nice writeup. It's interesting to me how strongly the design of original radar displays anchors the project. Your toddler might never interact with a real CRT, much less an ASR-9 with a PPI display. But you've gone to great lengths to simulate one for her. Partly because of your affinity for skeumorphism, as you said, but it may also be because the OG radar display is a fantastic distillation of "Is the…
I like your comment — it points out that our RADAR displays were a both a product of the technology that was used to generate them (the sweep) but also that it was a deliberate way to make clear what it was you were observing (target distance was represented by distance from center, target bearing by angle around the circle). To your point though, perhaps emulating the sweep was the questionable design decision — the…
Re: My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar
#251This is a great point - it’d be easy to de-anchor the sweep from turning but it’d be enormously complex to re-write the logic for the planes to make them fade in their own time (using the angular gradient to accomplish both the sweep and the fade was probably the best shortcut of the whole project!)