Motion Cells

This is an experiment I made a long time ago, inspired by a flocking cellular automaton I saw on Rectangle World. In this experiment, the canvas is divided into a bunch of cells, each of which maintain a vector. Every frame, each cell attempts to make its vector closer to the vectors of its neighbors, and the vectors are "normalized" so that the average length is 1 (some are longer, some are shorter). On top of this, I built 19 different variations, each of which displays the results in a different way.

My first few variations display the actual vectors, either just as lines or by mapping direction to hue and length to brightness. In most of the other variations, the code places particles "on top" of the cells, and they move in the direction that the vectors point. In a few of the variations, I connect the particles to each other and draw lines between them, making a sort of web effect. This was one of the first experiments I made with the HTML5 Canvas, and I like how it looks.