“Life Spacies” by Sommerer and Mignonneau

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Description:


    Life Spacies is an interaction and communication environment where remotely located visitors in a global environment (the Internet) and onsite visitors (in the local environment) interact with each other through artificial creatures.1

    By simply typing and sending an email message to the Life Spacies Web site (www.ntticc.or.jp/~lifespacies), visitors can create their own artificial creatures and receive their creatures’ pictures and curriculum vitae. As soon as the site receives a creature-creation message, the new creature starts to live in the Life Spacies environment. Two independent interaction sites are linked together via a data line, allowing visitors at remote locations to be displayed in the same virtual 3D space.

    Onsite visitors can directly interact with the creatures by touching and catching them. When a creature is caught by a visitor, it creates a perfect copy of itself. However, if two remotely located visitors are in the same virtual space, they can each catch a creature with their hands, which causes the creatures to mate and create an offspring by genetically exchanging their code. A special text-to-form editor enables translation of text into genetic code. The characters, syntax, and sequencing of the text are used to code specific parameters in the creature’s design. Form, shape, color, texture, and the number of limbs are influenced by the text’s parameters.2

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    References

    1. Life Spacies was produced for the ICC InterCommunication Museum,Tokyo, as part of its permanent collection.
    2. C. Sommerer and L. Mignonneau, Life Spacies: a genetic text-to-form editor on the Internet. Proceedings AROB 4th’99, Beppu, Oita, pp. 73-77, 1999.

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