We are looking for Beta Testers and as much feedback as possible.  So here is the blurb. Some of you may remember a UK web-based and then 3D Artificial Life project from the 90’s called TechnoSphere.  Since then – for fun – we have been maintaining a 3D PC version. Recently we have been working on TechnoSphere Creature Create Android app.  It’s the first in a suite of apps – an app eco system – designed to take full advantage of 3D, Artificial-Life, Augmented Reality, GPS and Simulation Gaming technologies. This first app allows the user to construct a TechnoSphere creature …

Prophet grew up in a house full of animals, and to this day her mother regularly mistakenly calls her ‘Marmaduke’, ‘Ella’ or ‘Queenie’ – the names of various family pets. Like many people, Mama Prophet talks to her animals more than she does to other humans, and she probably imagines that they are talking back, each twitch of the tail and nod of the head transmits as clearly as speech. TechnoSphere’s beasties used to ‘talk’ to humans via email, occupying the space between trained domesticated animal, and wild thing. We cannot control them, but like TV researchers filming big cats, …

In 1999, we created a graphic interface of the realtime 3D game version of TechnoSphere for the National Media Museum in the UK. Visitors could use the touch screen from the graphic interface at the museum. “Museum visitors can create creatures using touchscreen terminals to build creatures from available body parts. Once ported into the TechnoSphere, the creatures can be observed within the world on a series of large projection screens. TechnoSphere raises contentious issues involving virtual life and competitive “Darwinian” machines.” — Read more about the installation here. Were you there? What was it like interacting with the creatures on the …

The earliest prototype of the TechnoSphere Creature Creation app was actually coded for a windows PC. The whole prototype was built around some in-house tools (RWG,RWGI)that had already been developed and allowed this proof of concept to be built in a couple of weeks. Once this implementation was up and running we used this as the reference for the first version of the Android app. The prototype was built using RWG a light weight simulation wrapper for OpenSceneGraph (OSG) and RWGI developed to quickly develop 2D cockpit instrumentation

We visited a Mini Maker Faire hosted at Hong Kong’s Poly University this weekend, where we saw a lot of neat projects- an abundance of which focused on 3-D printing innovations. It was nice to see a version of the DIY Occulus Rift goggles that have been floating around the internet- such as those highlighted by MAKE magazine– which Tech Crunch writer Natasha Lomas has aptly dubbed, the “Occulus Thrift.” We tried out a pair and were surprised by how well it worked! No doubt a great option for those who want to experience virtual reality on a budget- all you …

TechnoSphere was featured in the UK-based newspaper, The Independent, in 1995. Author Cooper James’ awed description of the TechnoSphere world can give you an idea of how unique this artificial life project was for its time. (Note his use of the term “World Wide Web,” we don’t hear that much these days!) “The World Wide Web, the graphically rich region of the Internet, is host to many weird and wonderful experiments. Few, however, are as intriguing as TechnoSphere, an attempt to create a world of computerized creatures that will live and die in a landscape created by the latest image-rendering …

TechnoSphere was featured in The Guardian, a well-known newspaper in the UK, in 1995. Author Mike Holderness offered a neat explanation of how the project worked at that time: “A new, uninhabited planet opened for business on September 1. By mid-month it had been populated by 1,000 species. These beasties have now started interbreeding, eating (and being eaten), and evolving. On Planet Earth, conservationists have “adopted” a few of the cuddlier species. On Planet TechnoSphere, every species is adopted. What is more, they will send postcards back to their humans. You don’t get that kind of consideration from a whale.” Of …