evulvia blog

As I said in my first post, I was using a library from Jaume Sánchez Elías a.k.a. @thespite for showing Street View images on screen. It was called GSVPano.js and it was great, people used it for creating wonders like hyperlapse. It had a limitation, and it's that it only worked with the roads in Street View, but didn't work with special locations like some temples, building interiors, sky slodges, antartica or static spheric images uploaded by users that you can access via the Street View website. Now he made a new library called PanomNom.js that solved all this. I tried it and it's great, not only we have access to new wonderful images in evulvia.net, but it also allows creating evulvians in countries where the roads haven't been mapped by the Street View car. India, Morocco, Nicaragua, Syria, Mauritania, Qatar, Tanzania, Cuba, Lybia, China, Pakistan, Ecuador, Algeria, United Arab Emirates, Philippines, Senegal, Nepal, Côte d'Ivoire, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Bahrain, Kenya, Mongolia... I suggest you visiting his site clicktorelease.com, there are several great examples and tutorials about three.js, WebGL shaders and more javascript cool stuff, evulvia wouldn't be the same without it. Thank you Jaume!

Evulvians now give birth to baby evulvians!! I've updated the evolution batch process adding a new feature: when two evulvians are highly compatible there is a chance that they have one or more babies. Siblings are made of some shapes inherited from their parents, so they always look alike. Baby evulvians get the health, money and love parameters based in the country they are born, as any other evulvian, though it may be good if they were also slightly affected by their parents' values, also, I'll think about implementing that too.

Death has arriven to evulvia.net. I've spent these last weeks implementing how the different country indicators will affect the evulvians. I decided to make three major parameters that are shown to the users: health, money and love. Health is affected by how much money that country spends in public and private health, and will also change depending on how much money and even love every evulvian has. There's a hidden parameter 'thirst' that will also affect the health parameter, mostly in countries where access to improved water sources is difficult. Money will be affected by economic indicators, like the GDP per capita, poverty gap and unemployment rate. Love will vary depending on how many other evulvians they find and how compatible they are. Yesterday I finally updated the field 'isAlive' with a zero value when the health parameter is below zero, or when their age is around the life expectancy for that country. This means that now they die. They even look dead, laying on the floor where they died. It really shocked me seeing my beloved evulvian number 1 (the first one I got to successfully store in the database) dead, even though I knew what I was going to see. Spending months creating, visiting and following the several hundred evulvians already created made me feel attached to some of them, even though I know they live in a virtual world and they are not alive as we usually understand as a 'living being'. But why should they be different? Because they are not made of flesh and bones? What is actually 'life'? Artificial life is life, after all. The next step is making the ones that are compatible having children. I'm sure this will give me joys the same way these deaths let me grieving them.

Evulvians begin to move around the world. In order to calculate the path they follow, I use the javascript directions service that google provides. As it's a batch process to be passed once a day (or maybe more often), it had to be javascript executing in the server, this made me move to a new server that let me install node.js. Now evulvians go searching other evulvians, their first hint of intelligence! In fact, after several passes of the movement batch, some of them have met other evulvians, not being alone! Next step is they influence each other, maybe having baby evulvians :) The map has been updated showing the path the evulvian we are visiting has been following since it was born.

I've fixed the layout, added an info layer and made the google map not only show where every living evulvian is, but also added a button for you to create as many new evulvians as you like. For the moment, only where street view is available, I hope I can change that in the future as I want every country to be present in evulvia. I'll probably try with other panoramic images APIs. Right now my major big steps to take are: · 1: creating the evolution engine and · 2: work more on how the shape of evulvians is made and how will they evolve, like adding some kind of patterns or moving the vertexes to express the evulvians' state.

I liked this evulvian, with something like a star-octopus on its head. I'm beggining to store shapes on a database, so they'll be trackeable afterwards. Hope this one is correctly stored :) Evulvia, work in progress.

Evulvians begin to look like something else :) I'm using the javascript library three.js for creating the geometries that shape Evulvians. Three.js makes 3D drawing easy as it takes care of the heavy WebGL stuff. I've also played a bit with WebGL shaders. Shaders are really complicated to master, but also offer a great power when it comes to detail in textures and lights. I love how evulvians begin to look.

(sorry for the crappy image definition, due to tumblr gif restrictions - higher quality gif here)

I finally managed to download a set of world data indicators and merge them in a single table, so I could put all that info in a table in the database I'll use for evulvia. These indicators (per country) are relative to issues like how much money is spent in health, birth rate, maternal mortality ratio, life expectancy at birth, how many people have access to improved water sources, GDP, unemployment, migration... all data collected from the The World Bank. It will help me the way evulvians tend to look and how they will tend to behave.

Tenhaaf, Nell. "As Art Is Lifelike: Evolution, Art, and the Readymade." Leonardo (1998): 397-404. PDF:

Nature, always the best inspiration.

What is ALife - basic information about the subject and links to other resources

EVULVIA, an artificial life project just started by jordirosa. In this blog I'll document the whole process, how the project evolves, references and other links I find relevant to the project. My aim is to create a virtual world (an image of our own world) that people can follow through a website. This world will be populated by some forms of life, represented by a combination of geometric shapes (for the moment I'll call them "evulvers"). Users will be able to create new beings and selecting what country they are born in. This decision will determinate what kind of life that evulver will have, as some real data taken from the World Bank will be used to decide the probability of reaching age 5, how long will it live, if it'll need to migrate to another country, how rich or poor or healthy or un healthy it may be, etc. This, and the indicators of the countries it may live in (in case it decides to migrate) will be reflected somehow in its appereance. Evulvers will be able to exchange information with other evulvers. Sometimes, when two or more evulvers meet they may have a child, whose features will be a genetic mix of its parents, and will also be influenced by the country where it's born. I'm really looking forward to exploring the possibilities artificial life brings to generate beings that live on their own, how capable is this system of creating aestetichally interesting shapes, or how good it may be as an alternative way of data visualization. For a start, I'm trying three.js, a great javascript library for working with geometry and the amazing Floating Shiny Knot by @thespite. This is my final work for the Master in Digital Arts I'm studying at UPF, Barcelona. You can see some other things I've done at my other tumblr: jordirosa.tumblr.com.