This movie was produced from 200 ray traced images. It depicts an animation of a mathematical object called a Julia set, which is a type of fractal. Normal two dimensional Julia sets are made with complex numbers, but my 3D version is done using a generalization of complex numbers called quaternions. What makes the fractal really interesting is that it is actually a 4D object. This is a problem because we can only perceive three spatial dimensions, not four. In order to render a 3D image on the computer screen, one must "slice" the 4D object with a three dimensional hyperplane. Then the points plotted on the screen are all the points that are in the intersection of the hyperplane and the fractal.
But one cannot get a good sense of what a 4D object is like simply by examining a single slice of the object. That would be like trying to understand a complex object like a human being just by looking at a two dimensional cross-section. Ideally, it would be nice to look at many slices of the fractal in order to get a better understanding of its nature.
And that's what my video artifact is all about. Each frame of animation is a different slice of the same 4D fractal object. The animation runs from -1.00 to 1.00 units along the axis of the slicing plane, in increments of 0.01 units per frame.
Think of this video as a mathematical tour of a higher dimension! Enjoy the video! I hope you like it. :-)