Simon Heys

At tonic I was recently working on a project for a client where we wanted to get across the idea of different teams working on individual projects. I came up with the idea of magnetic navigation, which attracts a different group of people appropriate to the selected project.

There were a few ways of achieving this; the best one turned out to be using the elastic collision code, but adding attractive forces. There is a fair amount of mathematical calculation going on per frame. Flash 9 Alpha came out at around the same time, so out of curiosity I rewrote the initial ’sketch’ concept in AS3. Yields a massive speed increase!

Requires Adobe Flash 9 plug-in.

The site itself is Flash 8 and will be live early 2007.