I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t fully understand how strange attractors work, thankfully, Paul explained it just for us :
Attractors are really simple, basically you loop through using the last value calculated as the next value in the loop, like new x = old x + change, old x = new x. There are a few well-known equations which give you pretty shapes, and the one from my experiment is called the Lorenz Attractor. But really you can create your own attractor just by thinking up equations for x, y and z.
And in this case, Paul Lewis, better known as aerotwist, has created a stunning 3D Lorenz Attractor in WebGL with rainbow colours and additive blending.
In fact it’s worth looking around Paul’s site – there are loads of amazing JS examples and tutorials there. I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot more of his work in the coming weeks. 