Dr. F Kenton “Doc Mojo” Musgrave is the creator of MojoWorld - a piece of software which can be used to construct and render fractal worlds of enormous complexity and beauty. I interviewed him in 2001 for the Rants and Raves column which, at that time, I wrote for PC Plus magazine but which now forms a part of Bitwise. Unfortunately, due to the limited page space I had available at the time, only a tiny fragment of this long and interesting interview ever saw the light of day. I am pleased, therefore, to be able to print the interview here, for the first time, in its entirety…

This is Doc Mojo Musgrave’s self portrait. You might be able to pick out his mentor, Benoit Mandelbrot, hovering in the background.

Huw: What made you want to develop MojoWorld in the first place? I mean, it's a lot of fun to use but is there a 'serious' reason why someone would want to create whole fractal worlds?

Doc Mojo: “Because they’re there.” MojoWorld is driven by a personal vision. Since 1987 I’ve known these worlds existed in the maths. Realizing this, of course, I’ve felt compelled to give everyone who’s interested—and who wouldn’t be—a portal into this parallel universe. When you find a whole new universe, of course you want to share that discovery! “Serious?” Only if you’re serious about curiosity, play, exploration, discovery and experiencing wonder. My life is dedicated to these things. So yes, I suppose I have a “serious” reason, but that reason is best described as “play.”

I’ve been exploring little bits of this alternate universe since I realized the possibility—no, the existence—of what we now call the Mojoverse. But for 14 years my research code only revealed little bits of it, and at a cost of great effort to me, the sole user. MojoWorld finally opens the Mojoverse to all of us. That’s tremendously exciting for me, as it’s the beginning of the realization of my life’s dream. I figure that if you’re extremely lucky, you may find a gift in life to share with the world. For me, it is MojoWorld.

Now, you may wonder why I say this parallel universe “exists,” and why this is only the beginning. Well, presumably 1 + 1 = 2 has always been true, everywhere and for all time. As such it has an existence independent of humanity and our discovery of it. Other intelligent life in this universe is no doubt aware of it and uses this universal truth for their own purposes. MojoWorlds are exactly the same, only the computation is more complex than simple addition. Each image of a MojoWorld is the result of a deterministic computation that results in that image, just as reliably as adding 1 and 1 yields 2. There you have it. Pretty heady stuff, eh? “The truth is out there.” ;-)

I say it’s only the beginning, because this newly revealed universe is infinitely larger than the universe we inhabit. The universe we inhabit has four perceptible dimensions: The three spatial dimensions, plus time. The Mojoverse is infinite-dimensional. It’s unimaginably huge. So we’ll never explore more than a tiny, tiny fraction of it. And, of course, certain parts of it are much more interesting than others. We’ll have to find those parts, and the search will never end. Also, MojoWorld 1.0 is a pretty crude tool, compared to what’s to come. As a software application, we’ve designed MojoWorld very carefully, to be able to grow gracefully as the years go by. So you’ll see MojoWorld mature into a much richer and more engaging experience as the future unfolds and the releases go by.

Faster computers will always reveal more of the Mojoverse, more gracefully. And no computer will ever be fast enough, either. That’s why Intel’s Executive Vice President, Paul Otellini, is showing off MojoWorld as a technology of the future. MojoWorld will always demand the next generation of CPUs, so Intel loves us!

With MojoWorld you can create highly detailed landscapes which blend the real with the surreal

Ultimately, what we’re shooting for is the Star Trek holodeck experience. That, of course, is an ever-receding goal. But MojoWorld will be a hell of a lot more compelling when we have high-resolution immersive displays, and realism like the photorealistic renderer currently yields, only in real-time. At that point we’ll have the first true incarnation of virtual reality. VR, to date, is anything but “reality,” in my professional opinion. But it’s only a matter of engineering, both software and hardware, to get there from here. It will happen, and not too long from now.

Huw: What does MojoWorld give you in a practical sense that a more 'traditional' landscape generator does not?

Doc Mojo: First and foremost, it gives you the opportunity to explore. Second, MojoWorld provides a level of realism that surpasses other landscape generators, simply because of MojoWorld’s prefect detail in all renderings. In other packages, you “fall off the edge of the world” if you stray too far, and, when you get too close, the terrain and textures become flat and boring. This ability to roam and have perfect detail everywhere is what puts the “there” there in MojoWorld.

Other packages are more mature, having been around longer, and each has its specialty, things it does best. MojoWorld isn’t a replacement for the others, but rather an entirely new technology. Most “traditional” landscape packages are geared more for rendering real-world terrain data sets than for actually generating new terrains. MojoWorld excels at just that—it’s by far the most powerful landscape generator on the market. I personally put a lot of fancy terrains into Bryce 4 when I was part of the Bryce team at MetaCreations, but they’re a tiny—and infinitely less detailed—subset of what MojoWorld can do.

Here is just one view of one small part of one rather large MojoWorld.
Unlike most other landscape programs, MojoWorlds don't stop at the horizon!
Click HERE to view a larger picture (in a popup window).

Huw: Can you foresee real-world applications for this kind of technology (e.g. for scientific / mathematical / meteorological research)?

Doc Mojo: Yes, there are real-world applications for MojoWorld, but not of the types you mention. MojoWorlds are entirely synthetic, and to add “real world” data is to pollute them in a very real sense—it’s a violation of the procedural paradigm MojoWorld is based on. (Pretty fun inversion there, eh?) MojoWorld builds something from almost nothing: The files encoding virgin MojoWorlds are tiny, on the order of tens to hundreds of kilobytes, yet they specify an entire Earth-sized planet with practically infinite detail. The algorithms MojoWorld uses to conjure forth entire planets from this tiny seed of data only occasionally make reference to scientific laws—only when convenient. For the most part, they are artistic algorithms designed to generate pleasing forms and colors that often resemble reality as we know it. But there’s generally no claim of scientific accuracy in any MojoWorld model. MojoWorld reflects our lead programmer Craig McNaughton’s and my background in high-end Hollywood special effects: If it looks good, it is good. We’re not doing science here, we’re doing art.

MojoWorld could try to embody accurate scientific simulations of Nature. It doesn’t: Such simulations are way too slow and hard to control. MojoWorld could try to process data for scientific purposes. It doesn’t: Scientific data sets are notoriously huge, and part of the beauty and elegance of MojoWorld is in the microscopic marching orders that it translates into boundless information and beauty. The proceduralism that MojoWorld is based on and is the very apotheosis of, is a very specialized paradigm, or working model. You kind of have to have a PhD to fully appreciate that, but never mind that bull—MojoWorld is designed to be an easy-to-use software toy that’s fun to play with, while simultaneously being a software tool of unprecedented power for digital artists and Hollywood effects wizards. Who cares how it works under the hood?

If you call Hollywood special effects the “real world”—certainly a stretch!—then there’s one real-world application for MojoWorld. Certainly digital artists of all stripes will add MojoWorld to their set of software tools for doing everything from graphic design to fine art. Education is another important application of MojoWorld: It can be used to teach the fundamentals of fractals, and a whole lot of the complex and difficult discipline of 3D computer graphics. We specifically designed MojoWorld so that you could start with the MojoWorld Transporter (note: in MojoWorld 3 the 'Transporter' is now called the 'Viewer') as a child and, with perseverance over the years, actually train yourself to be a fully-qualified Hollywood digital effects artist, all with this one program. It’s that deep and powerful.

The biggest application for MojoWorld will be as cyberspace, the ultimate human/computer interface. In “Neuromancer,” William Gibson defined cyberspace as a “consensual hallucination,” the place where you go to access all the data on all the world’s computers. MojoWorld will be that consensual hallucination, like Neal Stephenson’s metaverse in “Snow Crash,” only not a boring black sphere, but rather an infinite variety of realistic planets, each hosting some different data display, avatar community, Myst-like puzzle, or whatever people put there. Most will be peaceful. Some will be infested with hostile aliens that you must exterminate lest they exterminate you (i.e., they’ll host shoot-em-up computer games).

Cyberspace is a real-world application. The Mac/Windows style “desktop” is the current human/computer interface of choice. But it’s 2D and boring. Cyberspace will be 3D and thoroughly engaging. So, in a very real sense, MojoWorld is destined to be the Windows of the future. And no, I’m not out to become Bill Gates Mk II, nor am I the Antigates, I wish only to share my vision and make a living at it!

I’ve written a paper on why MojoWorld is the right design for cyberspace. You can get it at http://www.wizardnet.com/musgrave//cyberspace.html, if you’re interested.

Exporing MojoWorlds... You can explore MojoWorld planets from close at hand.... ...or you can zoom out into outer space and look down upon them from a great height.

Huw: I don't mean to be too frivolous, but MojoWorld keeps reminding me of the character in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (Slartibartfast, I think?) who designed planets and prided himself on the quality of his fjords. Is this the kind of kick you get out of developing MojoWorld? The simple pleasure of creating beautiful things?

Doc Mojo: You got it! We considered calling MojoWorld “Slartibartfast,” but Slartibartfast is just not a pretty name. In fact, Douglas Adams intentionally made Slartibartfast the most obscene-sounding name he could come up with, without actually being obscene. So, not a great product name there. ;-) Although, in January of 1996, Scientific American did, in fact, run a little blurb on the work leading to MojoWorld under the title “Playing Slartibartfast with Fractals.” :-) I met Douglas on an elevator a few years back at SIGGRAPH and gave him my MojoWorld “elevator pitch”—literally! He was excited about the idea. It’s a pity he passed away just before its release.

Anyway, call it the joy of creation or the pleasure of discovery—these worlds already exist, after all—it’s sufficient reward in itself to behold and explore these strange new worlds. You feel like Captain Kirk, “boldly going where no man has gone before.”

A really interesting question when working in MojoWorld is whether you, as the artist driving MojoWorld, are creating or discovering these worlds. It’s one of those unanswerable questions—both are true, and neither is true. Sure, in an abstract sense, they already exist and the artist merely finds and images them. But, on the other hand, no one’s going to find the best ones by accident; rather, it takes a highly intelligent, carefully guided search that certainly qualifies as “creative,” to find a good one and bring home a striking image or animation of it.

This is yet another fascinating aspect of MojoWorld—to my warped mind at least. Hell, I wrote a 30-odd page paper on this topic, too, titled “Formal Logic and Self Expression.” If you’re up for a thorough flogging of the topic, you can get it at http://www.wizardnet.com/musgrave///FLnSE_text.html

Huw: But isn’t it the mathematics that is really of the essence?

Doc Mojo: Definitely not. Real mathematicians rightly consider the maths I do to be what they call “trivial.” (Yes, that’s the mathematical term they use.) The mathematics are my means of creation, that’s all. All artists have tools: Painters have paints and paintbrushes, sculptors have chisels, musicians have their instruments, poets have their words and dancers have their bodies. They know how to use these tools to create their art. I use mathematics similarly: Equations give me shapes and ways to combine them; I’ve learned to be facile at creating interesting and beautiful things this way. But my reasoning and intuition are entirely visual; it’s just that I construct things mathematically. Simple equations are the tools I use to sculpt and paint my artworks.

Now that’s certainly an unusual way to think and work, and we certainly don’t want you to have to become so pointy-headed to enjoy using MojoWorld, so there’s a user interface that hides the mathematical machinations from you, the ordinary user. You can be guided by your visual intuition, and ignore the hideous machinery that cranks out the result you’re after. Heck, this is true for anything you do on your computer, other than the rare microcode hacker. There are always software tools, starting with the operating system, that hide the complexities of the computer and provide high-level controls that provide easy results, efficiently. Photoshop is all math, too, under the hood, but virtually none of its users are aware of that, and none needs to be!

However, if you happen to be mathematically inclined or a programmer, well, then you can go into MojoWorld’s Pro UI and have yourself a ball. You can even write plug-ins to extend MojoWorld’s capabilities, if you like. We’ve knocked ourselves out to make MojoWorld all things to all people.

Huw: Speaking personally, I must say that the greatest joy I get from programming is the feeling of having crafted something. The thing that got me interested in programming in the first place was the old text adventure, Zork. Maybe if I'd seen fractal worlds instead of text descriptions of the world of Zork, I might have spent more time studying maths? Unfortunately, my school maths teachers managed to convince me that maths was dull, dull, dull... it's something I've regretted in later life.

Doc Mojo: “Tell me about it.” I failed Algebra in high school the first time around. When I finally found a use for mathematics, many years later in life, I had to relearn all the maths I had ever had forced down my throat in school. (I didn’t start making images from maths until I was 33 years old and had thoroughly forgotten all maths I’d ever learned.) Rather painful, that, having to do it twice. ;-) So, one of my fondest hopes for MojoWorld is that it will demonstrate to some young people, in a very real and tangible way, a way that even lights up the imagination, what maths can be good for, before they write it off. Had I known you could create MojoWorlds from maths, I might have paid attention the first time around myself!

We of Pandromeda are always looking for opportunities to use MojoWorld for that purpose. We’d like to see it used in primary schools, as a gentle introduction to certain aspects of maths and science. It certainly is more appealing than the standard treatment of maths, which is extremely dry, for reasons of the cultural history of mathematics. (Yes, there’s a story behind that, too, but I prefer to let Mandelbrot tell such stories; he has the weight to do it.)

Huw: I know you've been involved in fractal landscapes for quite some time. How do you think MojoWorld compares with the 'competition' (Bryce, Vue etc.) and what do you think will be the state of the art in, say, 5 or 10 years from now?

Doc Mojo: As I said earlier, all the other packages are more mature, as they’ve all been around for years already. They are generally more full-featured; for instance, most have vegetation, which MojoWorld does not yet have (note: there is now vegetation in MojoWorld 3). MojoWorld’s atmospherics are relatively simple in version 1.0. (Look for that to change in future versions—we want to catch up with Terragen in that area!) But for terrain modeling and rendering, well, nothing can hold a candle to MojoWorld. None of them delivers entire planets or has the real-time interface for exploration. (They don’t need it; there’s nothing to explore.)

In superficial ways, all these landscape packages inevitably look similar. Here’s what’s fundamentally new and different about MojoWorld: It’s the first 3D package, at any price, that delivers more than strictly local “stage sets.” Stage sets are always designed to be viewed from specific angles and distances; they’re always finite in size and generally, they look like crap if you inspect them too closely. In all other 3D software, your models are finite. (So are MojoWorlds, but they’re huge—the size of planet Earth.) If you move very far, you reach the end of the model or environment; you “exit stage left,” so to speak. If you get too close, you run out of detail and the view becomes boring. Not so MojoWorlds! (Of course, MojoWorlds have a less-than-infinite amount of detail, but for practical purposes, it’s far more than you’ll ever need.) So MojoWorld delivers the first truly global models, global environments for whatever you want to put there; entire worlds, rather than strictly local stage sets.

MojoWorlds, as we find them, are pristine, barren and empty worlds. But what is an empty world, but a place to put stuff? MojoWorld is also the one commercial landscape package with an open architecture—the next best thing to open source. (We’d go open source, but we need to make money to support our Mojo habit!) This open architecture will let third party developers add vegetation, cities, avatars, cars, etc.—stuff, in a word. We’ve deliberately designed MojoWorld to become much bigger than what Pandromeda can make it. It’s a sandbox for all to play in! The old hippie at play, you know? That’d be me. ;-)

Our plan for future releases of MojoWorld is first to create a solar system with multiple planets, then clusters of such solar systems, then a galaxy, then clusters of galaxies, then an entire universe. Simultaneously, MojoWorld will get faster. We will close the performance gap between the real-time renderer and the photorealistic renderer. (Of course, that’s an ever-receding horizon, too, as the photorealistic renderer gets more and more ambitious, with radiosity and the like.) When we’ve added lots of content to the context of the MojoWorld environments, and can image it in real time with something like the realism of the current photorealistic renderer, we’ll have cyberspace. That should happen within the next ten years. Though my friends at Nvidia tell me, “What are you, nuts? More like two!” To that I say, “Good on ya’, mate!” ;-) (Please excuse the colloquialism, I’m here in our programming office in Duendin, New Zealand, as I write.)

Huw: What was it that kicked off your interest in fractal landscapes anyhow? I mean, I can understand someone being interested after having seen some examples of virtual landscapes. But I guess you must have taken up an interest before there were any such landscapes available to see...? Did you already have a mental picture of what you wanted to create?

Doc Mojo: It’s been an interplay of what I saw as being possible, with exploration and discovery of what the fractal maths could conjure up. I’ve always been in terra incognita, intellectually, so I certainly couldn’t tell you with a straight face that I always knew where I was going; that’s for sure. But I had some ideas and insights, and combined them with the kind of single-minded focus we computer geeks are famous for and the persistence of an I-don’t-know-what. So, as the years have gone by, I’ve been able to reveal more and more of the beauty that’s inherent in this parallel universe we’re constructing/revealing with MojoWorld. It’s kind of like I glimpsed the Promised Land in my mind’s eye, and I saw how to get there. And it’s taken years to fulfill on that vision, years filled with a lot of engineering work, to get from here to there. In fact, technically, it couldn’t have happened any sooner than the new millennium, at least not on your home computer. Heck, MojoWorld is still beyond the capacity of the vast majority of home computers. On the other hand, they just don’t sell computers that aren’t up to it, any more.

Once upon a time, long before I got into computers, I was an art student. Artistically, my lexicon has always been landscapes and abstracts. There’s something in a beautiful landscape that attracts me in exactly the same back-brained way as a beautiful woman does—it just feels right, and calls to me. I love landscape painting and photography, and vistas in the great outdoors.

I ditched my art major early on because it was too much like work. The sciences seemed easier; at least there you know when you’ve got it right. Then I took a break for five years to be a Santa Cruz hippie. Having exhausted that particular line of inquiry, I went back to college. I went into computer science halfheartedly, simply because that’s where the jobs were, and because I’d taken an aptitude test way back in high school that said I should be a computer programmer, a forest ranger, or an interior decorator, in that order. Little did I know that I’d become a bit of each!

After a few years I got into computer graphics, fell in love with it and never looked back. Then came my lucky break: I was hired by Benoit Mandelbrot, the father/inventor/discoverer of fractal geometry—which is the key to MojoWorld—to be his programmer in the Yale math department, helping to implement some algorithms he was working on to include rivers in fractal terrains. This was my first brush with fractal terrains. I’d only been at Yale for a matter of weeks when Benoit left for trip, having first given me permission to “render unto Caesar, Caesar’s due” (he really said that) while he was gone—that is, to render some nice images of the terrains I’d been coding up. He liked what I came up with—Nimbus and Lethe—so much that he pretty much kept me on as an artist-in-residence for another six years, during the second three of which I earned my PhD in computer science for the techniques I was inventing. All the while I had a faculty office in the Yale math department, for proximity to Benoit so that I could be his handy joeboy, forever carrying his boxes of books about and doing other such exotic tasks. Since I was stationed in the math department for six years, and right-hand man to the most famous living mathematician, everyone assumes that I, too, am a mathematician. Ask anyone in the Yale math department—they’re clear I’m not!

Lethe is a rare case of an image I had in mind before I made it. Almost all images I’ve made have been discoveries from my explorations in the early visualizations of the Mojoverse. I’m more of a virtual photographer than a painter—I record what I find, more than making it up from scratch. A little like Ansel Adams, if I may be so presumptuous: He didn’t bulldoze the landscape to get his compositions; rather, he had a keen eye for beauty in Nature and the patience and skill to catch it in its best light. So, to contradict myself, yes, in a sense, it has always been about the maths—or, more at, about an exploration of the beauty inherent in them. Therefore, as a rule, I’ve never done any post-processing of my images in Photoshop or in any other way, other than to comp in my signature in a corner. Here’s the deal: I’m not interested in the maths themselves, but rather the visual beauty that issues from them, in its purest form. There Adams and I are polar opposites. He said “the negative is the score and the print is the performance.” I’ve always been a purist: The code is the score and the execution is the performance, but thou shalt not mess with the resulting bitmap. You see, to digress into a bit of pointy-headedness again, the unaltered bitmap that issues from execution of the rendering code represents precisely a theorem proved in a formal system. So my artworks are mathematical theorems. That’s so whacked-out I love it! Too weird. And too beautiful, in its strange abstraction, to mess with or sully via post-processing.

But for MojoWorld users, hey, do whatever you like to get the results you want! Interoperability is a keyword here at Pandromeda: We know that MojoWorld is just another tool in the software toolbox of the digital artist. As such, it must interoperate smoothly with those other tools. Even if it is a universe unto itself. ;-)

Simultaneously, for the casual user of the MojoWorld Transporter, we hope you find fascination in these worlds exactly as you find them, without further modification or enhancement outside of MojoWorld. That raw and elegant beauty always been good enough for me. And one wild thing is for sure: No matter how beautiful a vista or detail you find in any MojoWorld, there’s probably a better one somewhere else on the planet. Probably a whole bunch more…

Now if that’s not adventure calling, I don’t know what is!

MojoWorld isn't restricted to generating realistic-looking scenery.
Here is Doc Mojo’s ‘Splatworld’. Dorset was never like this!

For more examples of landscapes and planets created by MojoWorld, visit Pandromeda’s online gallery.

November 2005