For the last few weeks I’ve been on vacation so not much has happened. Except, even on vacation I couldn’t help play around with some ideas for how to build recurring Voronoi tessellations as part of some ideas I’m playing around with for how to include maps in the app. Because I think, ultimately, there’s a really fundamental choice I have to make around whether I center the app around text or maps. Maps is much harder but it solves a ton of problems and provides a much better user experience. So I’m trying to work out how I make that work – even when you’re offline – without replicating google maps. Some of my ideas around how to do that relies heavily on recurring Voronoi tessellations.
Now that I’m back home I’ve implemented some of my ideas and the result seems to work pretty well. The first three images above show part of the process that goes into building a tessellation, it’s all about generating random points and “massaging” them appropriately.
The last three images show how you use the result, here one with 256 tiles. The square itself looks pretty random, which it is, and then you can build larger areas of random tiles just by repeating the one square. At least to my eyes, it’s hard to tell from the 2-by-2 square in the last image that it’s not completely random but actually made by repeating the 1-by-1 square four times unless you’re looking for it. You need them to be color coded to tell. And that’s exactly the effect I was going for. Plus in what I’m using them for the basic squares will be bigger, probably 1024 or 4096 tiles, and you won’t see the tiles directly there will be something built on top of it that will blur them somewhat.
How that plays into making the maps of Denmark that I’ll display in the app, that’s the next step and I may or may not start working on that right away.
