Fractal mirror guide

Overview

Fractal mirror repeats your picture inside itself.

A dark blue sample picture of rings, lines and small shapes, wound into a spiral of smaller copies
The sample in Spiral Droste, with Zoom depth at its lowest so each copy stays sharp.

The Droste effect is a picture that holds a smaller copy of itself, which holds a smaller copy again, without end. The name comes from a Dutch cocoa tin whose picture contained itself.

Spiral Droste bends those copies into a spiral with log-polar mapping: distance from the centre becomes depth, so each turn of the spiral is one copy further in.

Five more modes use the same idea for zooms, mirrored grids, kaleidoscopes, tunnels and spiral arms. Every frame is drawn by a shader on your GPU as you watch.

Open Fractal mirror Start here

In this guide

  1. StartWhat you need, your first spiral, and saving the PNG.
  2. Every controlEvery control in the panel, one line each.
  3. Three looksThree pictures and the settings that made them.
  4. HelpWhat to do when something goes wrong.

It runs in your browser with WebGL 2. Nothing is uploaded. A mouse, a trackpad and a finger all work.