🎧 weekend creative noodling

nothing better than a client who lets me off the leash for R+D, without flinching at dead ends. last year dotdotdash sent me exploring visual directions for looking glass holo displays. one fail kept nagging at me, here it is developed it a bit further with sound 🎧

Digital Red Queen: Adversarial Program Evolution in Core War with LLMs Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used to evolve solutions to problems in many domains, in a process inspired by biological evolution. However, unlike biological evolution, most LLM-...

arxiv.org/abs/2601.03335

Core War has been a fascinating corner of aLife for decades. Adding LLMS, self-replicating programs competing for control of a virtual machine, each new warrior evolved to beat everything that came before. Same dynamics you see in biological arms races, showing up in code.

stumbled on emergent garden's work. anyone interested in artificial life, cellular automata, and the strange beautiful things that happen when you let simple systems run should check them out. the Life Engine project especially. @emergentgarden.bsky.social

Everything Procedural turns 10 this year. April 7-10 in Breda. April 7-10 in Breda with SideFX, JangaFX, and Embark Studios presenting. I've been deep in Houdini for procedural systems for just about all of my projects lately, so massive FOMO

BZOR.COM : Containment Unit Press Kit Press Kit for Containment Unit - A Vision Pro experience by K.C. Austin

25 years of building interactive experiences and the feel is still the part I care about most. Making gfx respond in a way that bypasses your rational brain and just feels right, making the hairs on your neck stand up.
bzor.com/containmentu...

The trick was layering vertex shaders for the movement of the spines synced to frag shaders for the color. Multiple functions at different scales and driving them with the creature's internal state. When you pet them, the color response ripples outward from the contact point through the shader.

One of the harder problems building Containment Unit was the creature skin. I wanted something that felt alive.. Pulsing/shifting color, responding to touch. Cuttlefish chromatophores were the reference point. here's an early stress test with 4 long ones at once (a bit hectic in a small space)

Speculative Evolution Through 3D Cellular Automata This project explores speculative evolution through a 3D implementation of Conway's Game of Life, using procedural simulation to generate unfamiliar extraterrestrial organic forms. By applying a volum...

3D cellular automata generating speculative morphologies, smoothed into bone-like structures, then 3D printed as fossil artifacts. Conway's Game of Life -> xenobiology. the results look like something you'd find in a natural history museum from an alien planet. arxiv.org/abs/2505.01692

In the late '40s the engineers at IAS in Princeton ran aLife sims on a machine they had to debug with oscilloscopes 🤯. Revisited George Dyson's "Turing's Cathedral" which goes deep into the IAS. Hit me as I'm working on CAs in the Vision Pro, they were working through the same ideas on graph paper..

so nice 😍

my "hello world" for learning new languages has always been code reflecting natural systems: cellular automata, boids, l-systems, cymatics. simple rules producing complex behavior. no prediction without running the system. constant surprise

just stumbled on this one, will give it a try! looks like a blast, bravo

Containment Unit App - App Store Download Containment Unit by Bzor Systems, Inc. on the App Store. See screenshots, ratings and reviews, user tips, and more apps like Containment Unit.

Live on the App Store: apps.apple.com/us/app/conta...

The hardware is finally good enough to make something feel fully present in your space, reacting to the light and geometry of your environment. Add AI into the mix now and the possibilities are endless.

I've been into artificial life and code mimicking natural systems for over 25 years. The Vision Pro was the first time I could bring my ideas into the physical world, reach out and touch them.
Built solo in Unity PolySpatial with Houdini, Blender, and Ableton. Deep shader work.

You edit their genetics, print them into your space, pet them, feed them. They drift and pulse and respond to you and your environment. Would love to hear how it runs on the M5.

Now that the new M5 Vision Pro has been out for a few months, it's a good excuse to resurface something I built last year: Containment Unit.
A spatial computing immersive experience where you summon procedural lifeforms into your room. 🎧

when petting the creatures I try to trick the mind into "feeling" touch, by adding loads of subtle audio/visual reactive feedback.. physics, color/motion shader ripples and dynamic audio (layered samples of cats purring 🎧 with phasers/flangers/delays) all come together to tickle the senses

subtle details are so rewarding in XR.. when they react to you in a complicated mix of audio/visuals/physics it's incredibly satisfying. vert shader color/motion ripples based on hand position, rope physics and dynamic audio (layered samples of cats purring 🎧 with phasers/flangers/delays) #visionpro

BZOR.COM : Containment Unit Press Kit Press Kit for Containment Unit - A Vision Pro experience by K.C. Austin

bzor.com/containmentu...

🧬 Containment Unit is live on the App Store 🧬
It’s alive! For the last few months I’ve been cooking up a sci-fi inspired AR passion project on the Vision Pro.. exploring 3D animation, UI, procedural creatures and sound design. If you have any questions let me know! It’s a wild one.. link↓
#visionpro

The development of an organism ... may be considered as the execution of a "developmental program" present in the fertilized egg. ... A central task of developmental biology is to discover the underlying algorithm from the course of development.
-Aristid Lindenmayer/Grzegorz Rozenberg

Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of human life is to grasp as much as we can out of the infinitude.
-Alfred North Whitehead

sad how most of my interesting work over the last 5yrs has been on NDA'd pitches and prototypes that never saw the light of day. last month I took some time off to go all in on a personal creative AR experience for Vision Pro, to finally get something out in the wild: ./Containment Unit\.

2/ native: team w Swift/iOS experience, app is UI heavy, only targeting Apple ecosystem, tight integration with Apple libraries, latest VisionOS features (Unity needs to implement so is always a little behind), need better native window/space management, easier app approvals, cheaper Unity Pro is 💰

depends on what you're doing but there isn't a big overhead. choosing which route to go can be a tough choice. here's my logic
1/ choose Unity: Unity based team, heavy game logic, reliance on Unity code packages/assets/extensions, AI Navmesh, Unity Physics, cross platform support, animation pipeline

just FYI unity polyspatial converts everything to RealityKit entities so the rendering quality is the same..