Ray Tracing Quaternion Julia Sets on the GPU Keenan Crane
(http://graphics.cs.uiuc.edu/~kcrane) This project takes
advantage of the floating point power of recent GPUs to quickly
visualize quaternion Julia sets. Pictures above were ray traced
in less than a second on a pair of GeForce 7800 GTX graphics
cards running in SLI (top picture originally rendered at 1280 x
1024 and downsampled 50% to reduce aliasing). First, a few
"frequently asked questions" about the project: Q: What in the
name of Gaston Maurice Julia are quaternion Julia sets?! A: A
Julia set is a kind of fractal, or object that looks somewhat
like itself at many different scales. The quaternion Julia set
is a four-dimensional version of this fractal (more detail
below). Playing with a small number of parameters for a set
results in a huge number of complex, beautiful shapes such as
the one shown above. Q: Why would you want to render these
things on the GPU? A: In general there are two problems with
quaternion Julia sets: - They take forever to