by simon baird

Monday, July 30, 2007

Announcing Fractalmapr

I had the idea for this last October. I tried to create it using a thing called OpenLayers, an opensource "Google Maps-like" system. At the time I didn't realise that it could be done with the actual Google Maps api itself. Long story short, check it out here. The domain name? Well back in 2006 it seemed cool...
What is it?
It's an online Mandelbrot set fractal viewer using the Google Maps API.

Hasn't that been done before?
Not that I'm aware of.

Things to try
  • Double click zooming
  • Mouse wheel
  • Dragging the mini-map
  • Dragging the blue square on the mini-map
TODO
  • Implement "bookmark/link to this view...
  • Better and deeper rendering. I'm using fractint (the finest fractal generator for the Intel 386 running DOS) and an antialias/size reduction method that I prefer not to mention. Hence the tiles are 256 colour gifs. I'm guessing 24 bit colour pngs would be a lot better but I can't find a free renderer that I can use in batch mode. Anyone want to help me with this? I suppose writing my own would be one solution.
  • Different palettes
  • Other fractals
  • Show co-ordinates in some way. A layer?
  • Make grey background in map into black somehow
  • Start a blog?
Update 8/9/08
I'm letting the domain name expire. The new url is this http://randomibis.com/fractalmapr/.

5 comments:

Green Apple Cat said...

Fractals are neat.

Kyle Mulka said...

If you have the original full image used to create this, you could try uploading it to my Gmap Uploader service and basically get the same result. I'd be curious if my Gmap Uploader would be able to handle an image that big, so please to try it out.

http://gmapuploader.com

Anonymous said...

A nice way to use the Google Map API.
I have build something similiar on OpenLayers API with an own cgi fractal generator to explore the Mandelbrot fractal. I use the pngwriter library from Paul Blackburn to create the tiles.

Mike Koss said...

I just finished a similar project as a demo for a JavaScript development service we're building (PageForest).

Check out:

http://mandelbrot.pageforest.com/

The main difference is that this one is progressively rendered, with image tiles cached dynamically on-demand in our cloud storage service.

JC said...

could you publish your code ? especially the code to customize a google map.

Thx