I don't have anything intelligent to say about this - but this for me is one of those moments where I feel positively in awe of how next level some people are.
This is really cool, since Portal I've been fascinated by the concept of creating optical illusions and optical phenomena with programming. While I believe that my mathematical knowledge is capable of comprehending this, I don't have any experience with the languages needed to program them. I'd like to though.
The gif is still very impressive. If I recall correctly the paper said that they did this by finishing the white hole in the original piece so they could do the conformal mapping completly.
More impressive is that Escher did this without a formal math training
It actually took some reading of GEB before I understood how impressive Escher's concepts were. I was fully taken by his illustrations, before even considering the pure-concept material.
I've seen this painting before but didn't think much of it. Now that I can see what's going on, I am dumbstruck with how abstract and novel this concept is.
My bet is that he is using a continuos transformation and the guys who first did this (at least as far as I know) reproduced and completed the original transformation grid that Escher did.
The transformation is a conformal map so it should not deform angles. Other explanation is that the fragment shader is losing information in the process and that float numbers are not precise enough.
There's a camera wobble effect he's applying that actually moves the camera slightly from side to side - might account for what you're seeing? On the shadertoy code (https://www.shadertoy.com/view/Mdf3zM), remove the #define WOBBLE and you should see a clean zoom.
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This spacial reasoning ability is so amazing.
http://escherdroste.math.leidenuniv.nl/index.php?menu=symmet...
The transformation is a conformal map so it should not deform angles. Other explanation is that the fragment shader is losing information in the process and that float numbers are not precise enough.
Still this is very impressive