[Stampo00]

The spline stuff is super useful to me for another non-cursor idea I've had simmering.

But I'm torn by this. The spline approach seems to look the most accurate. But when all three approaches are shown at the same time at the end, I think the spring animation might look more visually pleasing. But then, if the spring approach is only degrees better than CSS transitions, is it really worth all the extra code?

[Etherlord87]

You're comparing the end-path, but the CSS with easing just isn't smooth, because the easing abruptly stops when the target changes. Without easing you still have abrupt changes in cursor speed. In the end, as calculated above, you only need 90 bytes per second for 30 FPS cursor movement, so why bother... Maybe in your case there's more objects and then it makes sense to approximate, but then if you can deal with some CPU usage for that, you can build a detailed bezier curve, and then unsubdivide it where it wouldn't change the overall shape much (probably detectable with segment length). This way the approximation is done on the sender that has the entire data, rather than on the receiver.