alt Hacker NewsOne big aspect that made Bezier popular was local support, i.e. moving control points resulted in expected changes in the same direction. It's interesting that this is the result of a search for 'a curve family better suited for interactive design than cubic Beziers.' I think it's better for achieving curve quality in the sense of curvature changes, but not so much in interactivity.
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WillAdams • today at 1:07 PM
Yeah, editing TrueType fonts w/ B-splines which have a shared off-curve control point between two on-curve control points is nightmarish as a small change will ripple through the entire outline.
shuwix • today at 3:41 PM
One big aspect that made bezier curves popular was Quake 3 Arena. That was literally first time general public even heard the name.
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Trying the example from TFA, I think that it is easy to acquire a good intuition about how the curve moves when you pull a control point and the shapes of the curves that you can obtain are more beautiful and more interesting than what you obtain with cubic Beziers.
So I believe that if for you the "interactivity" does not seem better, that is more likely to be caused by being much more familiar about how cubic Beziers behave, from past experience, than because these hyperbezier curves were really less suited for interactivity. Also, the current implementation in JavaScript seems buggy.
For me, the poor approximation by cubic Beziers of some important curves, like conics and the Euler spiral, is an extremely serious defect, so I like these hyperbezier curves much more and I intend to investigate how efficient can they be, from a computational viewpoint.