Voronoi and Magnetism

I have always had a fascination with Voronoi cells. I never quite understood the math behind it (and still dont). Generally speaking, Voronoi cells represent an enclosure where all the points within that enclosure are closer to the seed than any other seeds. Weird and confusing, right?

In the above image, I have created 3000 seeds. The boundaries are the Voronoi cells. All the pixels within a specific cell are closer to the parent seed than any other seeds in the image. Okay, so I just said the exact same thing twice. Im sorry.

Lucky for me, Paul Chew has posted some nice Java source code which shows how to do Delaunay triangulations which end up forming the Voronoi cells. Check out his applet here. I think this was originally posted in 1997. Fantastic.

The first thing I wanted to try is to combine Voronoi with the magnetism studies i have been doing of late. This might be the very first instance of Voronoi being used as an Audio Visualizer (probably not though).

Or you can view the higher res quicktime here.

Oh, and a thanks to Golan Levin for showing me a couple interesting Voronoi artworks.

His Voronoi portrait series.
Scott Snibbe’s Boundary Function installation.

(Via all manner of distractions.)