Alan Chalker

This is a corrected version of the previous entry where I fixed the text describing the animation.

This is a very interesting entry to the competition, since it's basically an interactive UI that is the cool thing, not necessarily the published m file.

One other minor note, your images appear to be manually created and placed by hard coding tags into the published m file. I think the spirit of the competition is that someone be able to take just the m files and publish them on their own computers and replicate the output, which can't be done with this entry (however with some MATLAB kungfu you could create the images on the fly from with published m file)

To answer the question of using data not normally on the MATLAB path, I offer the following modification.
 
if ~exist('contest_data.mat','file')
    warning ('This was an entry to the MATLAB programming contest (http://www.mathworks.com/contest/datavis/home.html). Please load the contest data and unzip it to place contest_data.mat on your MATLAB path.')
    web('http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/23509?controller=file_infos&download=true')
end

no H1 line, no help section, no example(s), loads a file, which the typical ML user does not have and, therefore, causes an error right away...
no appreciable benefit to any ML user...
us

This is a corrected version of the previous entry where I fixed the text describing the animation.