Unit Circle Demonstration

This demo is kinda fun so I thought I would share it. Below is the visualization of my Unit Circle class I constructed in Flash ActionScript 3. I have a great need in the delicious:designer to do trigonometric calculations to find points in rotated coordinate spaces. So, hearkening back to my high-school trig days I created a class that defines a unit circle with a few unique properties. Perhaps the most convenient feature is the ability to set an artificial zero. In effect this rotates the horizon, causing all data points in the unit circle to be calculated with this angle taken into consideration. It also allows for the radius to be set to any arbitrary value (so it is not technically a “unit” circle), but this makes distance calculations between points in a rotated space quite convenient.

The sample here shows all the data points available in the Unit Circle class represented as labeled dots. To learn more about what each of these actually mean visit this article at wikipedia.

Using the unit circle class is ever so easy. Simply initialize it with three pieces of information: the center point, the radius, and either an arbitrary angle or an arbitrary point (that will cause the angle to be calculated). In this example the unit circle is animated by using a timer to continually set the angle to an ever-increasing number.

You can interact with it by clicking and dragging your mouse in any of the white space outside of the main circle. When dragging your mouse you are setting the arbitrary point to the current mouse position. Use the slider on the bottom to set the artificial zero to any angle between 0 & 360.

The class is still in production so I am not releasing its code, but if there is enough interest I will release it when I have fleshed out its features and completely debugged it. Drop us a line if you’re interested in seeing the code.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007 at 12:31 pm and is filed under ActionScript. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.