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.
It is my understanding that only a couple of very expensive font editors use B-splines where there are three control points which ripple as I noted, however it seems that FontForge supports order2 (quadratic, TrueType) or order3 (cubic, PostScript).
The other question is whether the control is local. As others have remarked, this has much more to do with the way the curve is embedded into a spline than the curve family itself. In particular, it is deeply affected by the continuity constraints. As payment for the local support, cubic Béziers only give G1 continuity. Euler spiral splines, by contrast, are G2 but changes do cause those ripples.
The pen tool prototype linked in the blog post suggests giving designers more choices. If you specify all control points, you get G1 just like a cubic Bézier. But it also gives the choice of specifying one control point on a smooth endpoint, and solving the other for G2 continuity. In my experience, it feels more like local control than Euler spiral-like splines. When you want smoother curves, you do that, and when you're willing to sacrifice continuity for local control, that's also possible.
I don’t doubt something Q3 related might have popularized it. I’m familiar with the fast inverse sqrt approximation that was popularized by Q3A. That’s not what you’re thinking of, is it? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root) But animators and most people in graphics and rendering (the Pixar, ILM, and Siggraph types) as well as all font designers and mathematicians and car designers and CAD people all knew about Bézier curves long before Quake 3 Arena.
You're right, I'm referencing to inverse sqrt.
Bezier curves were the main talking point about Quake 3 engine throughout all PC magazines when Quake 3 demo came out.
Because it was like nothing ever seen before, and noone ever expected it to run ~20-30FPS on period HW.
It wasn't a talking point for too long as with full game, Quake 3 became top multiplayer game, and graphics behind it were not important anymore.
Why do you say that? I was in graduate school studying computer graphics when Q3A was released. Before that, at a different school as an undergrad, there were entire courses on Bézier splines and NURBS and multiple textbooks that had written about them. All the universities in the US with computer science departments that taught any graphics in the 80s & 90s covered Bézier curves, and that’s not to mention anyone studying design, drafting, CAD, architecture, engineering, etc.
Ah I looked it up. Bi-Quadratic Bézier patches were used in Quake 3. They were tessellated into triangles for the HW.
The first quote I found from Carmack about this: “Well, this is technology that's been done since the late '60s as far as the different geometric representations go.” So it wasn’t new in general, but was new to real-time game engines, and there is a pretty big group of gamers and aspiring game programmers who heard about Bézier patches for the first time with Q3A. https://www.reddit.com/r/quake/comments/16w5g1i/the_quake_3_...