I've been working on a personal art project called (tentatively) "Bubble Tree." For it, I need these kinds of "active shapes" that you can move around, rotate, and scale uniformly.
It's not a new problem or anything. However, to my pleasant surprise, when I coded it up, I discovered that even simple, well-known interactions, when designed with an attention to detail, yield an unexpectedly fun, novel result.
a demo of the "active shapes"