Vision

My vision is to produce a Mandelbrot Magic that is state-of-the-art with respect to function and performance. Although this project is a desktop application, I envision future functional and performance enhancements that may be better situated as web applications and/or telephone applications. My vision of state-of-the-art Mandelbrot Set orchestration includes images and animations of highest quality. It enables the user to define and control as many aspects of perception as possible, including visual and auditory aspects. The application enables the user to animate or score these aspects or dimensions of the Mandelbrot Set. I refer to it as a orchestrator, as opposed to a visualizer, because it enables the user to superimpose the score of particular "instruments" where the set of instruments includes visual instruments (e.g., image resolution, iteration limit, and color map) and audio instruments or pre-existing music. More ambitiously, it may enable the user to define "fractal music" as a map between motion within a Mandelbrot Set multidimensional space and motion within an audio space: sound.

Business Case

There are several Mandelbrot Set visualization applications, some open-source, others proprietary, that enable the user to visualize the Mandelbrot Set, to navigate it, and, in some cases, to create an animation of such a navigation. There also is an application that attempts to push the state-of-the-art in performance, including accessing a GPU.

I have not seen any application that allows the user to control, for the purpose of animation, changes in resolution, iteration limit, and color map. I have seen systems that allow users to express animations appear only as straight lines between two points in "3D" space (i.e., real, imaginary, and zoom). I beleive that enabling more complex animations (e.g., spline-fitting), defined by a sequence of points in a higher dimensional space (e.g., including movement through a space of color maps) would push the state-of-the art. Similarly, there appears to be no application that enables the synchronization of a visual animation with a sound "animation" (i.e., music), which seems important artistically.

A high-performance back-end that uses a cluster of multithreaded machines and carefully optimized GPU usage may make "real time" navigation a reality, and certainly would improve system response to the huge computational demands of animation production.