Note: Best viewed with Google Chrome; not tested on any other browser. If you view with another browser or on a smartphone the animation may not be smooth due to the computations of trajectories happening as they are drawn.
This demonstrates the power of numerical integration of nonlinear equations using Javascript in the browser. I would have never considered using Javascript for such a task if I had not seen the benchmark tests for Julia and Numeric.js.
The animation is based on an influential movie from my childhood, Wargames. I must have watched it a hundred times as a kid. Since I've been trying to learn D3, I thought I'd try to recreate a portion of the final scene (you can watch here) using javascript. Some thoughts on the scene:
- Clearly the movie uses a Mercator projection