Project Description While at Microsoft Research, Conal Elliott wrote a paper describing Functional Images: images and effects created from the application of functions, and christened them Pan. PanBrowser implements a number of Pan functions in F#, and integrates them into a C# user interface.
| Stripes with Caustic | Boxes with Caustic | Tiletext with Caustic | Rotors |
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| bumpSwirl | another bumpSwirl | star swirl | herringbone with caustic |
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| rainbowRings with flower | | | |
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Images and Transforms can only be written in the F# source code and compiled, but images and transforms can have parameters varied at runtime and can be composed:
- Selection of images and transforms (currently only one transform, but planned to be multiple)
- Sliders to set parameters to the functions
- Standard scale, rotate and translation sliders for pre- and post-transformed image
- Button to Save image
- Background rendering of successively higher resolution images up to four-times oversampled (antialiased)
- 3D Images and transforms - using a marching cubes algorithm to plot an outline or iso-surface
- Trackball to rotate 3D images Planned features
- Gallery feature to display multiple images, transforms or combinations of settings
- Animation features to allow settings to be varied continuously - possible make this a screen-saver mode
- Runtime editing and compilation of new images/transforms
For example, here's a Mandlebrot set in F#/Pan:
//an image is a function that takes a Point (x,y) and returns a bool or Color
let mandlebrot p =
let rec checkMand z i =
if i > 200 then black
else if (distFromOrigin z) > 2.0 then
intToColor i
else
checkMand (addp (complex2 z) p) (i+1) // recurse with z=z^2 + p
in checkMand origin 0
And here's how you turn it inside-out:
let polarTransform xf = toPolar >> xf >> fromPolar
//a Transform is a function that takes an image function and returns a new image function
//so F# type is (Point -> 'a) -> Point -> 'a
let radialInvert =
let invert (r, th) = ( 1.0/r, th ) in
transformImage (polarTransform invert)
See Also: ExampleImages; Sliders
- http://conal.net/pan/
- http://www.haskell.org/edsl/pansharp.html
- Similarly inspired by Conal Elliot, Ken Peril, etc, and with an 'interesting' writing style: http://users.info.unicaen.fr/~karczma/Work/Clastic_distr/clastic.html - my challenge is to replicate his great example images in F#/PanBrowser
- http://blogs.msdn.com/satnam_singh/archive/2010/01/06/an-f-functional-geometry-description-of-escher-s-fish.aspx - Functional Geometry is only slightly different, and this shows an F# example
- Greg Egan - Great hard sci-fi plus graphics demos
- Ken Perlin - professor, graphics guru, demo-writer extraordinaire, star!
- Craig Ventrella - graphics demos defying explanation
- Matrix Ping Pong - so cool, i trust you've seen it already
- http://www.openprocessing.org - Visualisation scripting with great examples