Animations
Animation Format
The animations are on separate pages, one per animation, so click on the static thumbnails below to see them animated and use your web browser 'back button' to return here.
They require your browser to run Javascript but should be compatible with most popular browsers (I have tested it in Opera, Mozilla, Konqueror, Epiphany, Safari & IE 6 on Windows 2k, MacOS X & Debian Linux; it also gives no errors under strict testing mode in Opera unlike many popular websites).
The reason I used Javascript (which in turn writes the labyrinth as an HTML table & recolours it via CSS) is that normal animation file formats give too large files. Animated-GIF files a few hundred pixels high & wide with sufficient frames to appear smooth come to of the order of 10 MiB. The newer MNG format can have much smaller (but still not small) files but most visitors' web browsers are not configured with MNG support. MPEG, also still not very small, is designed for photographic not sharp-edged images so it makes the images blurry. Flash would have been suitable but needs an additional plug-in in some browsers, is proprietary and would have needed me to buy the horribly expensive Adobe programming environment. Instead I wrote my own animation method from scratch and the resulting animations can be thousands of pixels across yet are only about 10 KiB, a third of the file size of the little 38x64 pixel animated GIF used for the side borders of this page.
Classical Cretan Labyrinth
The archetypical ubiquitous labyrinth (albeit draw square not rounded) with colour flowing into it.
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Cretan,
narrow path,
single cycle, slow. (Elegant.) |
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Cretan,
medium path, single cycle, slow. (The original. Mesmeric.) |
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Cretan,
medium path, single cycle, fast. (Psychedelic.) |
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Cretan,
wide path,
single cycle, slow. (Cheerful.) |
Cretan Labyrinth with Path Looped
The archetypical labyrinth but with the end joined to the beginning so the colour flows with break forever.
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Cretan
looped,
narrow path, single cycle, slow. (Unending flow.) |
Roman Labyrinth
Similarly joining the ends of the square Roman labyrinth so the colour flows perpetually through the four identical quarters.
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Roman looped, medium path, single cycle, slow. |
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Roman
looped, medium path, single cycle, 4 frames. (Blinking quadrants.) |
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Roman looped, medium path, single cycle, slow. |
Roman Labyrinth with Four Cycles of Colour
Repeating the colouring four times along the path colours each quadrant the same simultaneously giving a different appearance, one that shows the labyrinth procession less clearly but is artistically pleasingly symmetrical.
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Roman looped, medium path, 4 cycles, slow. |
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Roman
looped, medium path,
4 cycles, medium. (My favourite of these artistically.) |
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Roman
looped, wide
path, 4 cycles, fast. (Gaudy. Not suitable for people who do not like flashing lights.) |
Cretan Labyrinths Rotationally Paired
A pair of Cretan Labyrinths rotated & joined so that the colour flows out of one into the other.
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Cretan
rotational
pair, simply joined, medium path, single cycle, slow. (Joined plainly.) |
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Cretan
rotational pair, loop joined, medium path, single cycle, slow. (Joined with a loop to fill the gap.) |
Cretan Labyrinths Mirror Paired
A pair of Cretan Labyrinths mirrored & joined. No gap to fill in this arrangement.
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Cretan mirror pair, narrow path, single cycle, slow. |
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Cretan mirror pair, medium path, single cycle, slow. |
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Cretan mirror pair, wide path, single cycle, slow. |
Templates
The templates are the same as for the static versions. Find those on their relevant pages from the Rainbow Labyrinth Gallery home page
More Rainbow Labyrinths
For more, go up to the Rainbow Labyrinth Gallery home page.