HPDZ.NET News

What's New

GroupB

GroupB is a project that started about three years ago, before the hardware and software were capable of making a full video from it. It shows series of very nice structures along the way to its final mini-Mandelbrot set at a size of 1.9e-78.

Details

Frame Interpolation

Last month we described some work on the frame interpolation component of the software, and GroupB represents the debut of those improvements. This animation contains 5 minutes of 720x480 video at 30 frames per second, which is 9000 frames. Rather than calculate all 9000 frames individually, 163 master images at a much higher resolution were calculated. Digital zoom techniques were then used to make the 9000 final frames in the video. This results in about a 75% reduction in the rendering time.

The only other significant video project on HPDZ.NET that uses frame interpolation is Tevaris, published in 2007, when the interpolation component of the software was rather primitive. The high-quality renderings of Tevaris show a subtle glitchy artifact when the video switches to a new master frame. This gets annoying very quickly.

GroupB demonstrates a significant improvement in the interpolation technology since that time. By overlapping video segments generated from individual master images, the transition from one master image to another is invisible.  By blending together video segments from adjacent master frames, the glitchy artifact is eliminated, and the video is indistinguishable from one with individually rendered frames.

GroupB is the absolute simplest possible type of zoom animation that can be made, just zooming straight into a single point with no acceleration, no deceleration, and no lateral movement or zoom-out. Future projects will take full advantage of the more powerful frame interpolation software and its ability to optimally render complex motion.

A Historical Point

CanyonDeepTrial1 was the first video published on HPDZ that used the overlapping master image technique, although the implementation at that time was very buggy and could not properly handle lateral motion.

Web Stats

I've never mentioned any web stats from the site before, but I thought some people might be interested. November has been a great month for HPDZ.NET. The stats for the month are not quite final yet (two days left) but so far we have the largest number of total hits ever in a single month, the second-largest number of page views, and the third largest number of unique visitors and number of visits.

An interesting trend over the past year is the decline in the fraction of visitors using IE (down to 25%) and a dramatic increase in users of Firefox/Mozilla (about 61%). Safari makes up about 6% of hits, and Google Chrome, about 4%.

About 60% of visitors to the site have added it to their favorites list, which is nice to know. One statistic to improve is over 93% of page hits are from a direct link or bookmark, as opposed to a search engine (4%) or from an external page (2%, mostly FractalForums.com).

Future work

Cubic Deep Zoom

Now that the frame interpolation software is working well, a cubic deep-zoom may be feasible. HPDZ has one cubic animation already, created back in 2004, but it is not a deep zoom and is only 320x240. Work is actively underway to create a cubic deep zoom to at least 1e-30.