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Comment by carlbarrdahl | Hacker News Reader

7 minute zoom of the fractal. Incredible level of detail and that final mirrored inverted fractal at 6'38 took me by surprise.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD9yNFmb2FE

Are there any good fractal explorers in VR?

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Not quite VR, but there exists someone's personal hobby 3D fractal viewer that has an absolutely bananas level of polish:

http://sub.blue/fractal-lab

I highly recommend taking the time to watch his video.

That is amazing. Thanks for sharing.

Was Fractal Lab ever made available to the public?

Author says no at the bottom of the video... there's something similar (and more basic) here:

http://hirnsohle.de/test/fractalLab/

I always find it a pity when I see something as inspiring as this that's not available to use (even without any support), but I guess that's the author's prerogative... (sadly!)

I don't understand how someone could spend so much time on an obviously excellent product and not want to show it off to the world.

Apparently the author was involved with an iOS app, but from this description it sounds like it's not the same codebase: http://fract.al/team

I believe that doing this for procedural generated games along the lines of No Man's Sky is the true future of where we can go for randomly generated worlds. Since a lot of planetary formation patterns we observe here on earth follow fractal-esque patterns, this would be a great application for a powerful generator like this one.

The risk with procedurally generated stuff is that it can feel adequate but soulless to the game player.

There can be a hybrid approach where, at development time, a bunch of procedurally generated assets are cranked out, and then a human artist hand-picks the best specimen and uses it as a starting point for a manually created asset.

Fractals and 3D are an interesting problem: http://www.skytopia.com/project/fractal/mandelbulb.html

That page is older, but based on the performance at the time I'm still not sure you could render them in sufficient real-time to make VR a useful thing.

(I leap to the assumption you're referring to 3D fractals because merely adding VR to a 2D fractal viewer does not seem like a useful thing to do.)

3d of a 2d fractal is one of the things the group that made the video from the original post are trying to achieve:

http://www.hpdz.net/TechInfo/CameraTilt.htm

you can imagine the compelxity of introducing perspective into the already computationally heavy fractal calculations

I'm sure they picked the point they're zooming in on intentionally, but I thought it was interesting when it started being radially symmetrical.

I wonder how they chose the point; trial and error, or was there some mathematical way of guaranteeing that there is something "interesting" at that point?

As long as you keep to the "edge" of the set, I think you're guaranteed to find interesting things wherever you go. I presume this zoom was guided, the exact zoom position manually adjusted every once in a while based on what comes up.

Or they recorded it zooming out, and reversed the recording.

But they still had to find an interesting point from which to zoom out, right?

Yes, but I imagine fractal heads are like us CA heads, spending hours toying and exploring the virtual spaces we've built.

CA?

Cellular automata,. Things like Conway's game of life, rule 110 and a lot others

From the video's description:

"The deepest and first ever HD deep-zoom animation into the Burning Ship fractal. This is one of the creepiest and yet stunningly gorgeous fractals ever."

I agree about the creepy factor. I've seen many a fractal video, but this one... is different. Maybe it's the music, but it really did feel mysterious and... creepy.

Thanks for posting the link.

That is insane. How is it possible to zoom in that far? Looks like it would have to use some kind of big number library and then parallelize the heck out of it.

I like how the rest of the page seemed to zoom out when I glanced outside the video after watching a few minutes or so.

A fairly recent technique is to use perturbation theory to approximate the solution to the complex equation for points near a decently chosen starting point. The approximation massively reduces the amount of slow big decimal arithmetic needed for deep zooms, while retaining accuracy. Without getting into the actual math being perturbation theory, http://superfractalthing.co.nf/sft_maths.pdf is a good start for just dumping some calculations into your fractal viewer to get good results.

I think this is a youtube upload of one of the animations from http://www.hpdz.net/ -- there's a ton others on there too.

They go into the techniques a bit on the site under the "technical" section.

I remember seeing seemingly endless fractal zoom animations like these as long as 20 years ago. Basically, you're not calculating the entire original field of view to anything near the final level of depth. At any given frame, you're essentially doing the calculations only for what's in the current frame and only to the level of detail to support the current pixel count.

Well, yeah, but the mantissa alone on your numbers is going to get ridiculously long. That's going to take a bite out of your CPU even just for the ~1000x1000 pixels in the frame

> Well, yeah, but the mantissa alone on your numbers is going to get ridiculously long. That's going to take a bite out of your CPU even just for the ~1000x1000 pixels in the frame

Utterly devastate the computational ability of your CPU. I remember setting up my and k6 300mhz to compute stuff sometimes for days to get awesome fractal deep zooms like this. The computation is embarrassingly parallel but no hardware handles numbers that precise with any reasonable speed. Something like 1024 bit floating point in fractint back in the day. I'd love to see an efficient GPU implementation of that kind of stuff

i always lament these fractal visualations lack a real time coordinate system

even just bounds at the edges of the visualised space would help to illustrate the phenomenon.. also, the utilised color key would further illuminate

Now that we are 5 years in future, it would be cool if someone re-rendered it in higher resolution, 60 fps and with better antialiasing.

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