Bizarre plants sprouting, growing, and mutating with crazy speed are a first step in creating a new cyberspace, its creators hope. Nerve Garden, which premiered at Siggraph '97 Monday, contributes new kinds of lifeforms to the often barren realms of virtual worlds - plants and insects.
Unlike avatars, which are controlled by people, and synthetic humans, which embody limited artificial intelligence, the lifeforms in Nerve Garden grow and change in response to genetic algorithms, simple strings of code used to build structures or behaviors.
"The whole idea is to create a common space on the Net where all kinds of weird forms can emerge," said Bruce Damer, CEO of DigitalSpace Corporation and the project's initiator. "It's open, and anyone with a reasonable machine can get in, hack away, and do a mini-Cambrian explosion in there."
Damer refers to the profuse development of new organisms that took place in the Cambrian prehistoric era. He hopes that in the future, a similar proliferation of digital life will take place, assisted but not controlled by humans.
Siggraph-goers can don a haptic CyberGlove, and, using a Windows NT or SGI box, pick out a seed and either plant it in virtual dirt, or place it in a digital germinator, which speeds its development. Through the CyberGlove, they'll feel the sensation of the seed pushing into the ground, the shape of the stem as they transplant their queer seedlings.
Digital gardeners will fly over islands teeming with plants, and ringing with uncanny noises created by Maribeth Back, a sound researcher at Xerox PARC, using the L-system genetic algorithm. They can hop aboard a butterfly or a buzzing bee for a guided tour, which includes a pelting thunderstorm.
Nerve Garden's interface and germinator are powered by Java, while the scenery was built in VRML 2.0. After its Siggraph premiere, Nerve Garden will be available online at the Web site of biota.org, a special-interest group of the Contact Consortium, and a working group of the VRML Consortium, that explores the use biological models in the electronic realm.
"People right now are playing with all the new technologies, and eventually all this work will converge," said Nerve Garden chief architect Karen Marcelo of Intervista, one of the project's sponsors. While Marcelo admits that even she finds it difficult to precisely define the project, she has hopes that "some cool tools will come out of it."
