HTML5 Fractal Playground

danielsadventure.info

18 points·DanielLangdon··6 comments

Love it!

If you're studying HTML5, the next thing to try is to execute the Mandelbrot iterations on the GPU with WebGL - GPUs are very well suited for fractal rendering; with a beefy GPU you should find you can render at 60fps

https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4df3Rn

(if it's a little slow, on line 5 set 'AA' to 1)

http://hirnsohle.de/test/fractalLab/ shows how far you can get with shaders and webgl

This is a project I created in my spare time to practice implementing various HTML5 features such as canvas element, web workers, touch events, etc. I also use the experimental asm.js for performance enhancement, which works best in Firefox, for now.

This draws beautiful fractals, such as the Mandelbrot fractal.

Beautiful! I saw another way of rendering these recently, which shows the increasing definition on the fly, here: https://guciek.github.io/web_mandelbrot.html#-0.5;0;2;1000

This took me way down the Wikipedia rabbit hole. Makes me think that fractals are a nature information compression technique.

You aren't the only one who thought that. Dr. Michael Barnsley (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Barnsley) was an early fractal researcher and started a company called "Iterated Systems" to commercialize the use of fractal compress tech. They were somewhat successful, but I think they were a bit before their time as finding the IFS to "compress" an image was computationally extremely heavyweight and the tech had to catch up with the theory. Disclaimer: I worked in Dr. Barnsley's lab at Georgia Tech in the mid-80s but was never involved with Iterated Systems.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com