Ken Musgrave and coworkers are developing fractal software to generate and explore artificial planets. The user will control parameters including dimension of the surface, and then do real-time flyby explorations of the planet. An early description of this project appeared in the January, 1996, issue of Scientific American. Because we are not trying to compress an existing image, but rather make a forgery of a realistic image, the multifractal approach is extremely compact. Random elements of the planet-generating algorithm lead to surprises for the planet designer. Musgrave describes this as "playing God in a found universe."
The level of detail is remarkable. For example, the left side of the picture below is part of a zoom sequence starting from the planet on the right. Click each to enlarge.
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