Virtual Psychedelia

TL;DR

The paper proposes real-time VR visualization of 3D Iterated Function System fractals using a GUI-driven Unity editor to assemble a hierarchical tree of primitives and operators. Fractals are rendered via a GPU compute shader performing sphere tracing on implicit surfaces defined by a signed distance function $f:\mathbb{R}^3 \to \mathbb{R}$, with the traversal encoded in a Matrix4x4 buffer and an alternative DFS-based mapping function. A runtime-friendly data-transfer pipeline avoids shader recompilation by looping over the matrix buffer and dispatching SDFs and operators, enabling live editing of scenes with 30 primitives and 6 operators. The work emphasizes designer-friendly integration within Unity and identifies future work on speed optimizations, texturing, and global illumination to enhance visual fidelity for immersive psychedelic VR experiences.

Abstract

We present an approach to designing 3D Iterated Function Systems (IFS) within the Unity Editor and rendered to VR in real-time. Objects are modeled as a hierarchical tree of primitive shapes and operators, editable using a graphical user interface allowing artists to develop psychedelic scenes with little to no coding knowledge, and is easily extensible for more advanced users to add their own primitive shapes and operators.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: Diagram of a model tree. Nodes are primitive shapes, edges are the operators used to compose the primitives
• Figure 2: Structuring objects in Unity's scene hierarchy creates model tree used by the renderer
• Figure 3: Example renders of \ref{['fig:modeling_diagram']} demonstrating the effect of ordering in tree structure.
• Figure 4: Example of a base Tile folded and rotated to create an iterated function system fractal