One of the most spectacular and accessible phenomena related to the bilateral symmetry is the generation of video-feedback complex trees in a computer screen. If the screen has a mirror effect enabled*, and a webcam starts to record its own output, the system will run into a loop that traps, transforms and copies the recorded frames again and again until they are reduced to mere fixed points forming a fractal attractor. Changing the camera roll angle or the distance to the screen, different fractal patterns emerge. The attractors of this home-made dynamical system are analogous to a family of IFS fractals generated by a pair of affine transforms. The figure below compares four video-feedback attractors with their associated symmetric binary complex trees.

*Mac users can use the mirror effect available in the Photo Booth app. Windows and Linux users can achieve the same effect with a Chrome’s app called Webcam Toy.