The web-based version of TechnoSphere is an award winning interactive computer-based 'virtual world', populated by artificial life forms created by users of the World Wide Web. Since its inception TechnoSphere has been internationally recognised. In 1997 the website won an award in Prix Ars Electronica, and went on to be chosen as one of the works for the Department of Trade and Industry and British Council international touring show High Definition: British Design for a Digital Future, launched in Hong Kong. In the same year TechnoSphere was shortlisted for Cap Gemini’s Imaginaria: Digital Art Awards and shown at Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. In 1999 it was recognised by the international jury for Life 2, and as "one of the first examples of an online Alife ecosystem, received a special mention for pioneering work in the area."

Online participation
The digital ecology of the 3D world, which is housed on our server, depends on the participation of an on-line public who accesses the world via the Internet. Users create their own artificial life forms, building carnivores or herbivores from component parts (heads, bodies, eyes, and wheels). Their digital DNA, or genetic specification, is linked to each component part, determining speed, visual perception, rate of digestion and so forth. Once a creature is built, users name their digital creature and it is tagged with their email address and put into the 3D world.

As the creatures grow, give birth, move, evolve and die they send brief email messages, postcards 'home' to the users that designed them, describing the key events in their artificial lives. Users can visit the website and see 2D snapshots of their beast at any time, check family trees, world statistics and trace other creatures and the users that designed them. For example users might be interested to find out more about a creature which their beast had interacted with, they can use the ID number of the other creature which is sent in the email messages to track that creature down.

TechnoSphere supports many tens of thousands of competing life forms, typically 20,000 creatures are alive at any one time. The proprietary technologies that support the website are scaleable, and can be developed to support a much larger community of up to 1 million creatures.

Mediating nature: an English tradition
In contemporary western society we engage with the natural world in an increasingly mediated way. Roads, fly-overs and tunnels pass us through terrain without contact. Our impression of nature is gained more from media and modes of travel than from any direct engagement. Our vision of nature is increasingly filtered through the technology of travel, the camera lens and the vicarious adventuring of holiday and extreme sports TV shows. In England the ubiquitous garden centre, with its covered walkways, café and scent of pot pourri has become synonymous with the ‘natural’. The huge covered domes of the English holiday resort "Centre Parks" offer guests the English landscape without the English weather. TechnoSphere extends this to Internet. Here is your wildlife, your adopted virtual pet, and there is no danger, no mess to clear up afterwards.

Landscape as territory
It is no coincidence that TechnoSphere is the product of a British team of artists and programmers. The project began following a series of discussions between Prophet and Selley about the English landscape tradition in painting and the potential impact of computer simulations of nature. What is often seen as the English countryside is, more specifically, the landscaped grounds and parkland of English stately homes represented by painters such as Thomas Gainsborough. These landscapes are far from wild or ‘natural’; they are frequently the result of extensive earthmoving projects by landscape designers from the eighteenth century, such as the famous Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown. Capability Brown was at his most prolific when ideas of the ‘beautiful’ were still largely entrenched in Neoclassicism and geometry. Brown designed in what came to be known as the ‘picturesque’ style, producing landscapes that were reminiscent of the pictures, or paintings, of Claude, Salvatore Rosa and Poussin. Paintings by these contemporaneous artists, purchased during the landowner’s ‘grand tour’ often hung in the private galleries in the houses that overlooked Brown’s newly sculpted grounds. When designing Brown used ‘naturalistic’ planting patterns and extensive earth moving to restrict the viewing frustum, sculpting the land owned by the commissioning patron so that it continued ‘as far as the eye can see’. In many of his projects there is an imagined privileged viewing position, a perfect spot from which the owner could look out across his property. Brown erased the formal overtly geometric gardens of his predecessors and replaced them with his vision of an idealised nature. He was not attempting to recreate wilderness or invoke the sublime (characterised as beautiful and terrifying nature), but rather to make the garden and the wilderness beyond it Beautiful, in the Neo-classical sense, to design landscapes of simplicity and light.

Computer simulated landscapes are similarly hyper-real, and the fractal generation of terrain is an attempt to replace the overtly hard-edged ‘geometry’ of computer modeling. Fractal generated terrain, such as that which makes up TechnoSphere’s landscapes [see Fig.1], appears on the surface to invoke the sublime, much of it is wild looking and the underlying code that generates it is born of chaos theory. But fractal landscapes are more picturesque than sublime — they are devoid of that ingredient essential to the sublime — terror. Ultimately we control their appearance using software, and while the images themselves may be reminiscent of the wilderness they are of a wilderness that is bounded by the computer screen or projection edge and forever contained. Similarly, TechnoSphere’s creatures are sanitised and contained; though the fact that users cannot directly control their creatures seems to be a key part of the digital beasties’ appeal. Users get a sense that they are dealing with an artificial life form which has its own volition, something wild and out of control, but ultimately it is safely bounded.

Access: from private to public
TechnoSphere embodies a shift in ownership and access both in regard to the concepts that underpin it and the technologies used to produce it. In a country where the "Englishman’s home is his castle" country houses, once the domain of the aristocracy, are now literally open to the public, having been handed over for public use as their owners become unable to maintain their upkeep. At the same time as physical access to the sculpted grounds of these houses is opened up, the techniques for producing sophisticated computer simulations has migrated from the rarefied flight simulation industry. With the decline of the defense and civil aviation simulation industries, fractal modeling techniques and real-time graphics developments have been appropriated by game developers and made publicly available.

In military training simulations, idealised landscapes are modeled and mediated by the computer to focus the trainee fighter pilot on key features such as airstrips and enemy landmarks. A variety of digital techniques, comparable to Brown’s landscaping, are employed to emphasise these aspects of the terrain. The mapping and modeling of enemy terrain using digital images of radar and satellite images ‘taken’ by the commissioning defense organisation already implies a kind of ownership over the enemy’s territory. The connection between these techniques and TechnoSphere goes beyond the theoretical. Both Selley and Hurry cut their teeth in the simulation industry and Selley’s first research into fractal landscape and trees was as a PhD student funded by Rediffusion Flight Simulation. We produced the real-time version of TechnoSphere using techniques which were developed for flight simulation training and which were subsequently appropriated by the games industry.

Wildlife or domesticated animal?
It could be argued that the horse was the first domesticated animal, the first wild creature to be tamed. The famous horse Xanthos, meaning "tawny", was one of the two horses of Achilles, and was supposed to have been able to speak, thus preceding "Mr. Ed the Talking Horse" of l950's TV by more than two millennia. The idea that Achilles' horse talked suggests that there could have been a special kind of communication between horse and human at that time. The directed evolution from wild and untamable horse, to tamable and breedable horse, to a rideable horse that works closely with its human rider in both hunting and warfare, has taken millennia. Achilles’ talking horse is the final point in this long process. TechnoSphere creatures behave according to rules contained within Selley’s NovaGene life engine, and have no underlying domestic or anthropomorphic qualities. However, users assume their creatures have human-like drives and feelings. When we first put TechnoSphere online, creatures were identified by a number only, and we received hundreds of emails from users asking to be able to name the creatures that they made. When the virtual creatures die, some users design their own memorial websites and write long tracts, imagining the details of a creature’s life, texts which fill in the gaps and the details omitted in those email postcards ‘home’.

Again, our decision to programme these virtual wild animals to send email messages, and the wording of those texts, may be related to the British obsession with domestic animals. 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 Prophet 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 beasties ‘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, or marine biologists studying whales, we name them and monitor their behaviour.

The real-time 3D version
Developing the real-time version of TechnoSphere gave us the opportunity to show the creatures in their context. Providing a graphic window onto the TechnoSphere virtual world is a first step towards highlighting the importance of environment in shaping the life forms that inhabit it. Often Alife does not have environment, just bodies. By contrast we are interested in focussing on the creatures’ relationship with their environment. Environmental factors are driving forces, and the real-time location based entertainment is a chance to see these forces at work and to begin to understand how changes in environment can cause changes in behaviour. Creatures’ movement in the terrain is effected by their inability to traverse the hilly areas and their confinement to the plains. Their behaviour is marked by their almost constant search for food, their quests for suitable mates, and the way that their offspring follow them through the landscape, attracting predators. The installation at Bradford enables the visitor to see in real-time that which has been hidden behind closed doors.

In April 1999 we installed the first of our real-time 3D systems at the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television at Bradford, UK. Wired Worlds is a new gallery at the recently refurbished Museum and showcases a number of interactive digital art works, with the aim of using them to highlight recent technological developments.

Our remit for re-working TechnoSphere for the Museum was to make it highly visual, fast, fun and easily accessible. Users would be able to spend no more than 15 minutes using the piece, and interfaces had to be designed for users who might be partially sighted or in wheelchairs.

In this version the users create a creature, from an extended palette of textured body components, which they can then see in real-time, interacting with other creatures and the environment. The environment consists of rolling hills, mountains, Savannah and barren areas. Trees and bushes populate the more fertile areas, and herbivores can be seen grazing through the undergrowth. As with a real-life grazing creature, once the supply of food has run out TechnoSphere herbivores have to move to new pastures.

The system uses networked PCs to enable users to design creatures using a touchcreen interface and to view the Alife populated world simultaneously on large projection screens. Due to the heavy computational requirements of the Alife simulation and computer graphics the workload is split between computers. One PC is dedicated to the Alife simulation code, and up to three other networked PCs are dedicated to service user interactions and the display of 2D and 3D graphics. The touchscreens are used to design creatures and to select which creature to view and subsequently to control the virtual camera (to pan, tilt and zoom in on the selected creature or to navigate a free flight through the world).

The Museum does not currently have an online connection from the real-time version of TechnoSphere to the web version and we therefore had to design the system so that users would get a flavour of the project in a one-off visit. We had to translate the ‘narrative’ of the email text messages, which characterise the web version, into visual action. Users would not be getting emails every week or so that told the live/life story of their creature, telling them it had grown, predated, mated or died, instead visitors to the Museum would have to see a meaningful section of a creature’s virtual life in 15 minutes.

Famous for 15 minutes
The Alife engine runs at much higher speeds in the Museum version so that visitors can see their creatures live, play, mate and die in a matter of minutes. To maximise the real-time action, creatures are teleported into the terrain as adolescents with raging hormones, rather than as children (as is the case with the Internet version).

A visual update rate of 25 frames per second is maintained for the ‘live’ projected scenes from TechnoSphere, this rate results in smooth motion of creatures and landscapes as the camera moves through the TechnoSphere terrain. This has a serious impact on the Alife simulation, and heavy computation is necessary in order to maintain these update rates. Some load balancing has had to be introduced to allow the nearest viewable creatures to be updated more frequently than those creatures that are off in the distance, outside the viewing frustum.

The popularity of TechnoSphere’s online creatures is directly related to their ‘narrative’. In designing the real-time 3D version we based the look and feel on the current web version — creatures therefore had spiral telephone flex bodies, heads like vacuum cleaner attachments and eyes on stalks [see Fig.2]. Clearly they do not look like any carbon based animal, although their underlying energy model is mammal-like. The look of the beasties’ component parts emphasises their artificiality, and we extended this approach in the real-time version to the design of the animated sequences that symbolise significant moments in the creatures’ lives. Instead of receiving an email message such as "Man-Eater mated with Boogy Knight (ID 832294)", visitors see the mating ritual on screen. For years the only sex on BBC television was to be found in the wildlife programmes made by the famous BBC Natural History Unit teams. While the British public is now blasé about seeing sex on the screen we decided to symbolise mating, killing and birth rather than taking a literal approach. After all how might single-sexed wheeled creatures mate? In the location based entertainment version the mating action in the Alife engine triggers the display of an animation and both creatures emit a double helix, each of which breaks in two to co-join and rotate, to signify real-time mating.

While we allude to science in the mating animation, we maintain a humorous approach to death at the jaws of a carnivore, which is represented by the spinning of a succulent kebab spit above the prey. This is swiftly followed by the dead creature swapping its usual body shape for that of a bloody carcass. This carcass is either completely eaten by the victorious predator, devoured by other carrion-eating carnivores that happen upon it, or it decomposes and is absorbed and turned into nutrients in the ground. Either way, as time passes the image of the carcass shrinks until it disappears.

We commissioned the sound artists Justin Bennett and Anna Wellmer to create sounds linked to the actions of the creatures. Each creature has a general chatting sound, a mating call, a war cry and a death howl. The sounds are triggered from the Alife engine and are audible above the 3D environmental sound that Bennett and Wellmer also produced. In order to stop the ‘live’ sound becoming a cacophony, only the creatures close to the camera are audible, and others in the background are faded out. The 3D sound envelopes visitors standing in the 4 square meter area in front of the projection screens and viewers are drawn into the piece as a result. The environmental sound is a 60-minute loop that uses a process called particle synthesis to take both artificial and natural sound samples and chop them into minute sections. Sounds are then re-generated using a simple Alife programme to produce naturalistic effects. These have been mixed with wind recordings and the sounds of actual swarming insects and foliage to provide an ambient track that is in keeping with the images of a digital Savannah.

TechnoSphere V3, the real-time 3D version, has been installed at The National Museum of Photography, Film and TV for almost 2 years. While the piece itself changes subtly each day depending on the creatures created by new visitors, these changes are bounded by the creatures’ behaviour which are controlled by rules that are defined in Selley’s NovaGene alife engine. The appearance of creatures does not evolve and the landscape they roam is fixed. Our next development will be a standalone real-time 3D version of TechnoSphere available on CDROM for users to explore at home, with futuristic-looking creatures and landscapes. Dynamic weather patterns, simulated natural disasters and more varied terrain will follow. Our aim is to forge a link between the web-based TechnoSphere and versions running at museums and on users own machines, to enable creatures to be ported between them. The appearance of creatures will then evolve as a result of cross-breeding and subsequent shifts in the TechnoSphere gene pool.