This project explores the aesthetic qualities and methods of virtual growth and how a virtual system could respond to live environmental data.
This project was developed out of a keen interest in A-life systems, growth, biology, emergent patterns and collective behaviour. I am fascinated with the complexity that generative design offers and how using rules that mimic natural processes can produce beautiful forms. Ideas such as growth, decay, death and birth, were explored during the development of this project.
Questions Explored:
- How can we make virtual environments/organisms show the effects of time?
- How can outside stimulus affect the development of virtual environments/organisms?
- What patterns emerge in the environment as a result of human interaction?
- What patterns emerge as a result of artificial evolution or outside stimulus?
born/manufactured
grown/constructed
object/organism
Blog
Research – Eden
Eden is an interactive, self-generating, artificial ecosystem. A cellular world is populated by collections of evolving virtual creatures. Creatures move about the environment, making and listening to sounds, foraging for food, encountering predators and possibly mating with each other. Over time, creatures evolve to fit their landscape. ...Read more
Research – Emergence
Emergence is what happens when the whole is smarter than the sum of its parts. It’s what happens when you have a system of relatively simple-minded component parts — often there are thousands or millions of them — and they interact in relatively simple ways. ...Read more
Research – Responsive Environments
I am intrigued by the development of virtual spaces, virtual objects and environments will increasingly become more life like, malleable and responsive. Maybe not in a way that mimics life as we know it but we could explore even more options, unbound by real world physics and processes, something that represents the essence of an ever-changing, data driven, user-participatory space. ...Read more
Extended Environments Markup Language
EEML is a protocol for sharing sensor data between remote responsive environments, both physical and virtual. ...Read more
Research
I found the paper Evolving Virtual Creatures by Karl Sims incredibly interesting and useful for my research. Karl Sims has researched and worked on developing genetic algorithms along with 3D artificial evolution processes. He uses a genetic language, which controls behavioural systems for the creatures e.g. swimming, jumping, and walking. ...Read more
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