I've seen a lot of fractals in domes. Pretty much all of them have been 2D, with no dome correction, which I find quite nausea inducing, and definitely non-immersive. I was revisiting some sites I'd found looking into genuine 3D fractal rendering. Cool things were happening before with GPUs, but on this visit I came across Mandelbulber - looking through the manual I came across a reference to a 'fish eye' option, and got quite excited...
This is what Mandelbulber produces if you set the FOV to 1, and give it a 1:1 aspect to render to. I thought this could be an Equirectangular projection. Coupled with the fact that there were references to 'Spherical Mapping' in the source code. Remapping to fisheye gives pinched polar regions:
From this I assumed that it was a Cylindrical projection. I tried remapping from Cylindrical to fisheye:
This still doesn't seem quite right - I haven't tested it on a dome yet, but it just looks wrong...
[edit 18th Feb]
Well, 'Buddhi' the author of Mandelbulber has come up trumps - he modified the code to produce proper equirectangular output. So look out for fantastic 3D fractals in a Fulldome theatre near you...
