A quaternion Julia set is a four-dimensional equivalent of the standard two-dimensional fractal. By taking a 3D ‘slice’ through the 4D space it is possible to visualise a solid fractal.

This quaternion Julia set ray tracer is a port of Keenan Crane’s Cg GPU implementation for Adobe Pixel Bender and a more general GLSL shader patch for Quartz Composer. The Pixel Bender version lets you render out high resolution images in Photoshop CS4 (or animate the parameters in After Effects). The Quartz Composer patch lets you animate any parameter in real-time.

Very impressive.

Read more about the making at 4D Quaternion Julia Set Ray Tracer

See also Fractal Explorer Plugin for PS and AE [Mac, Windows]