Click the image to see the experiment in action.

 

Arrow keys to move clockwise/widdershins. Click the movie if nothing happens at first.

My tile game experiments led me back to an old project where I was trying to recreate/reinvent the game Gyruss in Flash. I was playing around with the Perlin Noise generation functionality in Flash, and co-incidentally came across a polar distortion class at BIT-101. I took it, played with it a bit, and figured out how to go from Polar Distortion to Twirl, with the addition of one very short line of code. Voila! I had the thing you see above. The addition of a simple gradient provides the depth.