Cellular starts with a snapshot of a creatures likeness via a camera phone. That picture is recognized by image recognition software and your resulting creature spawns in the virtual ooze.
Each creature is tagged to the sender. Each creature will try to band together with identical species, as well as attack other organisms. How long will your creature or species survive..minutes, days, weeks? How long will it stay at the top of the food chain?

I've been very interested in the mobile phone as a controller. This idea began from using text messages to create a field of phrases in my mid-term. I decided using the camera, and having an actual snapshot of your creature on your phone was more intriguing and immersive. I ultimately wanted to use their cellphone in an entirely new way.

I came up with the idea to spawn creature via the cell phone when I was introduced to the Mobot image recognition software. I saw how well it worked, and I knew I wanted to do something with it. The name Cellular came to me as I was coding creatures that seemed to swim in fluid, and it all went downhill from there. To finish the Cellular (or Cell) play on words, I chose to name the creature phenotypes after infamous inmates of Alcatraz. The prison behavior of fighting and banding together seemed to coincide perfectly with the theme as well.

Anyone willing to play that has a cameraphone. (and if they don't they can use mine)

The user or users walk up to the screen and look at the kiosk and maybe take a card. Each creature has a little info about its traits. The user snaps a pic of the one he or she likes, and it spawns on screen. More people spawn creatures that they like, and watch as they band together or attack other species. Users might try and recruit friends to add more of their phenotype to fight back a dominant creature type. There should be a nice ebb and flow of species dominance.

It's programmed in processing and php mainly. The gameplan is to have this running 24/7, and persist. The user can view the same environment on the main display or at home on an internet enabled machine.

I've learned quite a bit about converging mobile with persistent displays, discovered some really interesting methods of coding, and broke my brain a little bit.