Design Fractal Art on the Supercomputer in Your Pocket
From the post:
Fractals are deeply weird: They’re mathematical objects whose infinite “self-similarity” means that you can zoom into them forever and keep seeing the same features over and over again. Famous fractal patterns like the Mandelbrot set tend to get glossed over by the general public as neato screensavers and not much else, but now a new iOS app called Frax is attempting to bridge that gap.
Frax, to its credit, leans right into the “ooh, neat colors!” aspect of fractal math. The twist is that the formidable processing horsepower in current iPhones and iPads allows Frax to display and manipulate these visual patterns in dizzying detail–far beyond the superficial treatment of, say, a screensaver. “The iPhone was the first mobile device to have the horsepower to do realtime graphics like this, so we saw the opportunity to bring the visual excitement of fractals to a new medium, and in a new style,” says Ben Weiss, who created Frax with UI guru Kai Krause and Tom Beddard (a designer we’ve written about before). “As the hardware has improved, the complexity of the app has grown exponentially, as has its performance.” Frax lets you pan, zoom, and animate fractal art–plus play with elaborate 3-D and lighting effects.
I was afraid of this day.
The day when I would see an iPhone or iPad app that I just could not live without. 😉
If you think fractals are just pretty, remember Fractal Tree Indexing? And TukoDB?
From later in the post:
Frax offers a paid upgrade which unlocks hundreds of visual parameters to play with, as well as access to Frax’s own cloud-based render farm (for outputting your mathematical masterpieces at 50-megapixel resolution).
The top image in this post is also from the original post.
I first saw this in a tweet by IBMResearch.