Why You Should Help Kickstart Wiglets, an Avatar Pioneer's Artificial Life, Augmented Reality Creatures for Mobile

Click here to consider financing Peck Peck's Journey, a real world book which interacts with Wiglets, a pretty brilliant form of artificial life conceived by Linden Lab veteran Jeffrey Ventrella, a leading innovator in avatar creation (see here and also here). "When I was working at Linden," Jeffrey tells me, "I was trying to inject more life into the avatars (and other things). As a software puppeteer, I use more than just basic principles of character animation to inform avatar software design; I also use my expertise in artificial life research." This project, he says, "is all about applying this knowledge and experience towards a new genre of virtual worlds that infuses autonomous agents into a real world context."

How's that work, and why should you, oh lover of all things virtual, help finance it? Read on, read on:

• They're completely self-animated: "No artist or animator was involved in their creation. Each critter is the offspring of two parents."
• They have open source AI: "The brain component will be open-sourced as part of the Core Library."
• They are augmented artificial life: "Their genomes are stored in the cloud along with their geo-locations. This means they can exist in specific locations in the real world (on top of Mt. Everest or at the corner of Vinayak and Chimbaiin in downtown Mumbai."
• They are platform-agnostic: "They run in pure C++. We will have an Android version of the code soon. And the core library is being designed to be completely portable across platforms.

So they got all that going for them. Also, they can dance on T-shirts with poop (see above). But oh yeah, there's just a few more days to Kickstart them -- so please go here to think about doing just that.

Please share this post:

Tweet

 

Comments

[Cake]

Jeffrey Ventrella is a genius. I've been a fan of his forever! I especially enjoyed Darwin Pond, waaay before I knew SL existed.

I've also played the "Bird" original program, which is a totally cute time-waster.

I still love Darwin Pond (and its newer version) to this day, though. It's awesome to let a simulation run and watch the test tube creatures run their course. Sometimes they survive, sometimes the environment doesn't work out and they perish.

[Molly Montale]

Three free mobile wiglet apps you can grab now from Wiggle Planet. http://www.wiggleplanet.com

[Pathfinder]

So much of the activity these days around AR/AI/VWs/VR feels to me very antiseptic and disconnected from life and the natural world.

Wiglets are the exact opposite.