I am not naive enough to believe I originally created this effect. As with anything, there always seems to be someone somewhere that did it sometime before :). Either way, I made a version of it for my previous site in AS2 and it came with me when I updated the site.

Ever since that first site there’s been a somewhat steady flow of questions regarding it. I vaguely remember writing a AS2 tutorial for it on gotoandlearn and I get a lot of mails regarding it.

So, I figured I’d take advantage of AS3’s massive improvements and create a transition class with the same effect. It’s hard to give it a specific name, but I’ve always called it the “pixelating transition“. You’ll understand when you check it out. Go ahead tough guy. Click the header!

Inside you can find a quick experiment + source to a AS3 class that breaks up vectors/bitmaps into particles and then moves them around in a semi-random firefly pattern. It’s a little bit CPU intense so I added a fps meter (fpsbox, courtesy of Schell Scivally). On lesser computers I’m sure it can choke a little bit due to the 2000-ish bitmap particles swarming around with filters but all it all it should be fairly okay.

I guess it’s fairly useless, usability wise, but it looks friggin cool and it can handle any shape or size. The larger, the slower however….