Simon made this beautiful interactive Islamic star pattern from Daniel Shiffman’s one hour long coding challenge he devoted to the refugees. The coding challenge is based on this paper about computer visualizations of geometrical Islamic art.
Late last night Simon almost completed the project in Open Processing when the browser crashed. He had to start completely from scratch this morning. This time he worked in CodePen. You can play with his Islamic Star Pattern yourself at: https://codepen.io/simontiger/full/BWXwWp
The code: https://codepen.io/simontiger/pen/BWXwWp
The project step by step. The algorithm involved building a grid of polygons and finding midpoints for the sides in those polygons and then making those midpoints send out rays at certain angles that meet to form star-like shapes:
The above picture is from Craig Kaplan’s PhD thesis on Computer Graphics and Geometric Ornamental Design. Below Simon explains what distance δ means:
Geeks out of the box 