https://editor.p5js.org/adj311/sketches/7GDNfA4A3
This week I decided to build off of the particle system I made last week and implement a simple yet cool visual effect where each particle tracks mouse movements and steers towards it, haphazardly. I like the curling effect that naturally occurs when multiplying the magnitude of the steering effect of the agents (which is treated as a vector that is the distance between mouse position and position of each particle) as some particles will randomly be further away as the user moves the mouse, causing them to trail behind even more and speed up. I did not implement a max speed because of the ability to click to run the program again. Even keeping the mouse still is a cool effect. My initial idea was to have each mouse location be a target or spawn for particles, attracting other particles between their own spawn and other targets, but this ended up being a very messy effect, and far to laggy because of the number of particles being generated. This is still a very cool effect which I think may be similar in appearance to flocking (?). Looking forward to further exploration, the visualization here is much more interesting to me because of its organic and smooth feeling when moving the mouse around the sketch.