The Pixel Farm

This week I developed an extremely rough prototype of a small virtual world using Flash and my favorite server-side language, Perl. My goal with this project was to create a proof of concept that integrated a sense of synchronous presence, streaming audio and 3D graphics all in one package.

This world, which is an extension of my Sim Snails project from back in the Spring, puts you in the drivers seat of your very own virtual snail.  I wanted to model the structure of the world after the augmented reality version of the snail garden (see below).  The eventual goal for this project is to create a playable evolution game that helps to illustrate the concept of genetic fitness within an ecosystem.

The original Augmented Reality Sim Snails garden

Right now you can log into the world and do the following:

1. Identify yourself using an avatar name
2. Move your avatar around in 3D space by clicking on a location
3. Chat with other snails logged in at the same time
4. Play a shoutcast stream using the integrated audio console
5. Watch beautiful 3D flowers grow out of the ground

Screen grab of snail-ville

If you want to try it out, here’s a link to the live version of the world.  Disclaimer:  the server that keeps this experiment going may go down without notice.  I’m going to work on getting a stable version up and running very soon.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 2:24 pm and is filed under Live Web, Virtual Worlds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.