Jon

You could speed it up by having a bitmapData object as the background and just cumulatively draw the lines on the bitmapData. That way, Flash doesn’t have to render all those dots each frame
maybe alpha will make the trend more obvious?

Would love to see the vector field with the “influence” of the friends next to the vector field without the influence of the friends (to see just how strong the influence is.) Whoops, I spoke too soon, the “heart” example demonstrates that nicely. Neat idea for a project. You know, I think the debug visualization is actually just as interesting and engaging (if not moreso) than the real visualization. 🙂 -SB

It’s really nice the see them wander at first and then snatch on to someone else’s path. Though, I feel like the lines don’t have a purpose. Where are they going? Why follow someone going the north if your destination is south? Granted, this might only apply to one of your scenarios, but I was slightly put off by someone traveling to the right and then following someon traveling in the opposite direction.
well, think about working in the snow- we pick path stepped over already, sort of forming the pattern. — I agree, but at some point we have to consider our destination.
Perhaps speed could be influenced by how many people have already traveled in that path. The first feet are slow, and as more people beat down the path, they get faster.
yay the kinetics could be more organic.

It would be great if you could add an actual ui to set the parameters, this would be fun to play around with

I’d love to see this done with opacity and/or color, I feel like it could be really beautiful

Nice work, I somehow like the simple aesthetics.
As you are not animating the shapes the fast way would be to draw into an image buffer and just add to that each time.

awesome! agree footprints would make it very interesting