The Organism project is coming along nicely, and should be mostly complete by the end of this week, yay for finishing early. Have a play with the semi-working prototype below and tell me what you think.
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.
Automatic photo pop-up is a project by Derek Hoiem demonstrating how computers can interpret a flat image and convert it into an immersive 3D scene.
Image interpretation, the ability to see and understand the three-dimensional world behind a two-dimensional image, goes to the very heart of the computer vision problem.
After much deliberation and many arguments our group has decided on www.clarity3d.com as our business site. Now we just have to make the bloody thing. Yay!
I think its important as a creative person to get inspiration ‘outside the box’. You could go around looking at what everyone else is doing in web design for instance, but then you would end up making a site that looks like everyone else’s. So instead i’ve been looking to traditional art and books for ideas on creating an electronic organism.
Science-Art.com has a gallery packed full of natures creatures among other things. I’ve been focussed on the idea of simple organisms so much I almost forgot there were big mammal things that are also classified as organisms. But creating a project to simulate an eco-system of artificial humans in Flash would take me a little longer than the deadline, so maybe its just as well.
This makes me think of a rotating 3D cube with mini eco-systems on each face, raging in a battle for survival against the other sides of the cube.
There are so many beautiful patterns in nature which have a mathematical quality, capable of being simulated in a few lines of code. Fractals are especially cool in this way, then add some movement and you’ve got yourself an organism.
On another note, I remember reading some of the crazy behaviors of creatures in The Selfish Gene, one that popped into mind was the Mexican social spider, so I google booked it.
“If a spider is disturbed and driven out of its retreat, it darts across the rock and, in the absence of a vacant crevice to hide in, may seek refuge in the hiding place of another spider of the same species. If the other spider is in residence when the intruder enters, it does not attack but darts out and seeks a new refuge of its own. Thus once the first spider is disturbed the process of sequential displacement from web to web may continue for several seconds, often causing a majority of the spiders in the aggregation to shift from their home refuge to an alien one”
Can you imagine that? It only takes on spider in the middle of thousands of the little buggers to get disturbed and the whole lot of them set off darting around like headless chickens.
I’ve been thinking about 3D stuff for a project proposal to create a digital art piece, but have so far come up totally uninspired.
Then I happen to stumble upon this cube of coolness by James Clar, and see light at the end of the tunnel.
Each 3D Display Cube is a true spatial display unit that utilizes 1000 individually controllable LEDs to create 3D forms and animations.
So how do you change a bulb when it blows out again? Yeah, that one right in the middle.