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| Ken Musgrave and coworkers have developed 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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| See http://www.pandromeda.com/ for the latest advances. |