Put a shrunken copy of the picture inside the picture. Now do it again inside
that copy, and again, and again. One point never moves while everything keeps
shrinking toward it — that is the fixed point, and it is the drain the whole
image spirals into.
Execute walks that nesting outward and inward and animates it. Zoom in by exactly
one level and the frame looks identical to where it started: level 1 has become
level 2, and a fresh level 1 has appeared behind it. That is why the loop has no
seam — the last frame is the first frame.
The copy has to be a cut-out. A rectangular paste shows its own edges, and the
zoom drives you straight through them as hard square borders. Keying the flat
background to transparent leaves a silhouette that sits in the drawing instead of
on top of it. "Edges only" is the one you want for line art: it clears the
background that touches the border and leaves enclosed white — the inside of an
outlined shape — alone.
Zoom far enough and you run out of picture. The backdrop colour is what is left,
so it is what infinity looks like here. Pick it out of the drawing and the fade
disappears.
You also run out of detail, and that is the other reason deep nestings go
soft: a 0.1% copy zooms a thousandfold in one loop, so a bitmap spends most of that
loop blown up thirty times or more. Load the drawing as an SVG instead and it
has no such ceiling — the magnified levels are re-drawn from the paths at the size
they are being shown, so the edges stay hard however far in you go.
Keyboard
- ← ↑ ↓ →
- Nudge the copy (Shift: ×10)
- [ / ]
- Rotate the copy
- - / =
- Scale the copy down / up
- Space
- Play / pause
- F
- Fit the view
- Enter
- Execute