Me and Jack my partner for this project have just been ironing out our ideas, and we’ve settled on ‘Life in a petri dish‘. We decided this would be an ideal environment to experiment with simulating small artificial organisms. It also allows us to introduce interaction using virtual tools as if you were looking through a microscope lens playing with a cell culture.

Basing this on the idea of genetic evolution, each organism would have individual characteristics which would hinder or help the survival of that creature. Using microscopic tools new organisms can be born into the petri dish, or be killed and moved around with a suction tube/prodding stick.

Creatures may interact with each other, even mate or destroy each other. When mating occurs the ‘genes’ from the two parent organisms combine to create a new individual, which may have a few new genes of it’s own from mutation. This evolving could give it an advantage over other organisms, resulting in good genes spreading throughout the population.

We’ve also been toying with the idea of introducing viruses or nano-bots into the mix, which would interfere with the normal lives of organisms, but this is preliminary thinking.