The Kingdom of Aurullia
When I first saw the image above it took my breath away. With no context whatsoever, I assumed that I was looking at a photo of a large industrial complex in the United States, or China perhaps. At the same time, the landscape portrayed in the image is somewhat surreal, almost alien. So maybe, I pondered, the image was a still from a sci-fi movie?
Then I learned that it was neither. In fact the image is one of a small series created by rather clever chap called Tom Beddard with a program of his own devising, Fractal Lab.
Fractal Lab definitely meets my definition of “cool”. It’s a WebGL fractal toolkit/editor that runs entirely in the web-browser. To my eyes, it looks like an incredible feat of software engineering.
If you have a sufficiently capable browser, you should have a play with a demo installation. Note: requires WebGL, JavaScript and 50MB of local storage.
I strongly recommend you also take a look at the rest of Beddard’s works. There’s some pretty jaw-dropping stuff in his portfolio.