What is mandelbulb-xr?

Mandelbulb-xr renders a Mandelbulb, a three dimensional version of the well known Mandelbrot fractal, and keeps it slowly changing shape rather than staying still. Most animated versions of this fractal simply move one setting back and forth on a single repeating wave, so the shape reverses in an obvious loop. This project instead moves that setting using two waves that never line up in a repeating pattern, so the fractal drifts and morphs in a way that does not visibly repeat or reverse. At the center of the project is one shared piece of graphics code, written in GLSL, the shading language used for rendering effects like this on a graphics card. Around that shared core, the project provides several thin wrappers so the same fractal can run in different places. You can try it instantly in a web browser with no install, where you can drag to rotate the view and it works on both desktop and mobile devices. You can also copy the Shadertoy version and paste it directly into the Shadertoy website to run it there. Beyond the browser, there is a version built with a framework called LOVR that runs as an actual virtual reality scene you can walk around in on Windows, macOS, Linux, or a standalone Quest headset, and another version built on OpenXR and Direct3D 11 for PC based virtual reality headsets, which can also be streamed to an Apple Vision Pro headset using CloudXR. Because GLSL is shared across the Shadertoy, web, and LOVR versions, and the OpenXR version is a close port of the same logic into HLSL, someone wanting to add support for a new platform mainly needs to set up a camera and a main function around the shared core file, rather than rewriting the fractal itself. The project credits its distance estimation and orbit trap coloring technique to prior published work on Mandelbulb rendering, and adds its own contribution on top: the shared portable core, the slowly wandering evolution, and the virtual and augmented reality streaming variants. It is released under the MIT license.