Friday, October 4, 2013

Fractopia - fractal rendering with the GPU on PlayStation Vita



The above video shows Fractopia, my GPU-powered fractal explorer for PlayStation Vita and PlayStation Mobile certified Android devices. Sorry about the poor focus - it's hard to film yourself playing something on the Vita!

I had the idea to try GPU-accelerated fractal rendering on the Vita a while back, but I didn't get around to actually messing with it until a few weeks ago. My initial experiments turned out quite well, so I took the time to make it into a full-fledged application.

As you can see in the video, Fractopia allows smooth panning and zooming of fractal imagery. It allows you to navigate the Mandlebrot and Julia fractals, and lets you change the Julia seed in real time to create a huge variety of interesting "fractalscapes" to explore.

Fractopia has passed PS Mobile certification, so it should come out on PSN in the next few weeks.