WebGL Fractals

A live raymarched fractal running on your browser's GPU — the same mathematical family that powers the fulldome work, rebuilt as something you can touch. Nothing is pre-rendered: every frame is computed in real time as you move. Less a video, more an instrument.

There are no polygons here. For every pixel a ray is marched into the scene, stepped forward by a distance estimator — a function that returns how far any point sits from the fractal. Follow it closely enough and an object of near-infinite detail emerges from pure equation.

At its centre is the Mandelbulb, the 3D cousin of the Mandelbrot set: the iteration z → zⁿ + c in spherical coordinates. POWER sets how many lobes bloom; ITERATIONS sets how deep the detail runs. Beyond it sit a Mandelbox, Kleinian, Juliabulb, Apollonian, Quaternion and more — each a different law for folding space onto itself.

The maths isn't hidden behind the picture: the Mandelbulb's distance function can be edited live, line by line, recompiling in place against the running image. Light, fog and render modes — including fulldome and equirectangular — preview how a form wraps across a planetarium dome, and a gamepad unlocks a free-flying 6DOF camera.

It all points back to the research: how universal patterns and computation mirror both the world and the mind observing it. The film fixes one journey through these spaces; here, that journey is handed over.