Pretty awesome. The description is great, but there's one false note: "If you were 'actually' traveling into the fractal your speed would be faster than the speed of light." 2 objections:
a) What is the speed of light in the mandelbrot set? What zoom level do you designate to be 1m?
b) The 'speed' the camera is traveling at is hugely variable. It's basically slowing down by an order of magnitude every constant window of time. So if the final image is 1m wide, you're travelling 10^n's of universes every second at the start. The above sentence doesn't come close to doing this idea justice.
I went over the video a second time to see how often the camera 'steers'. The entire second half drops pretty much straight down a radially symmetrical 'well'. There's 2 obvious changes in bearing between 2 and 5 minutes. In the first 2 minutes it's harder to keep count because much of the time there's no radial symmetry. I suspect the bearing is changing almost constantly.
Summary: the video was made by choosing a point about 2 minutes worth of zoom in, and then pretty much dropping straight down, except for a couple of tacks. Whoever did this was probably trying to maximize the diversity of views; at any point in the video a different tack may have ended up back at something like the starting point much sooner. It's mind-blowing to contemplate.
Travelling at The speed of light - approximated as 300,000 kilometres per second or 186,000 miles per second, It would take 8 minutes to reach the sun. After 8 minutes of the animation - the size of the original set would be bigger than that distance by a size you just can't comprehend.
a) What is the speed of light in the mandelbrot set? What zoom level do you designate to be 1m?
b) The 'speed' the camera is traveling at is hugely variable. It's basically slowing down by an order of magnitude every constant window of time. So if the final image is 1m wide, you're travelling 10^n's of universes every second at the start. The above sentence doesn't come close to doing this idea justice.
Update: the sentence is from the original at http://vimeo.com/1908224
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I went over the video a second time to see how often the camera 'steers'. The entire second half drops pretty much straight down a radially symmetrical 'well'. There's 2 obvious changes in bearing between 2 and 5 minutes. In the first 2 minutes it's harder to keep count because much of the time there's no radial symmetry. I suspect the bearing is changing almost constantly.
Summary: the video was made by choosing a point about 2 minutes worth of zoom in, and then pretty much dropping straight down, except for a couple of tacks. Whoever did this was probably trying to maximize the diversity of views; at any point in the video a different tack may have ended up back at something like the starting point much sooner. It's mind-blowing to contemplate.