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Heh just a thought, some of the fractal images are just crazy and would love to see them made into games and such, how hard would it be to allow a output of some kind to recreate the 3d image of the current in view into 3d making programs?

Hollywood and the film TV industry generally have been using fractals for years e.g. the Genesis Effect (Star Trek III:The Search for Spock), though granted AFAIK not Mandelbulbs or Mandelboxes (yet)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computer_animation_in_film_and_television

Computer games have been using code that is essentially controlled fractals and/or CSG trees for years, in fact in some ways Fractal Art software is lagging way behind the use of fractal principles in computer games.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/iSE1bjCEsYA&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/iSE1bjCEsYA&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1</a>

The only essential difference between CSG trees and IFS is that strictly IFS never stops mathematically (CSG trees are basically LRIFS i.e. Language Restricted IFS).
IMHO most procedural objects in modern games are built on fractal principles - whether the game coders knew or not !
As to first use of IFS in a game/sim if I remember correctly a US miitary sim used fractal trees in the 90's or maybe even earlier.

This is very cool. I've been working on the same idea for a while, though I'm not as far along.

Do you use a CPU implementation of the DE formula for doing the collision detection (this is what I'm doing right now) or are you pulling data back from the GPU somehow?

For those who haven't seen it, this is a fantastic little FPS made by Farbrausch for a demo competition years ago:

http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=12036

Also their demo last year features 3D models interacting with a Mandelbulb (the comments imply they use a cpu generated mesh):

http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=56458