ArtChaology

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Virtual Kinka Kuji

Virtual Kinka Kuji was a virtual reality landscape of a famous Japanese temple in Kyoto Japan built in 1998. While the model of the temple was more of a artistic interpretation the research focus was upon creating emergent artificial life within the landscape.

Researchers took a game system called “Unreal” modeled the temple and grounds, then created an artificial life ‘firefly’ that would come out at dusk and fly through the forests. Each firefly was connected to an American stock on the NASDAQ market, and depending upon how the stock was performing dictated much of the firefly’s behavior.

The question being explored was simple; “Could an unpredictable complex system be considered emergent enough to create true artificial life? The stock market had rhythms but never exactly repeatable patterns. Every day was something different. Since the Kinka Kuji virtual environment was connected in real-time to the stock market, it was fantastic to watch the fireflies emerge every night, and exhibit unique and individual traits every time. Yes there were behavioral patterns, but the interesting thing that started to emerge was flocking of fireflies. This meant that stocks did follow sector movements and were heavily affected by them.

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Full paper published by the IEEE Computer Society, 2000.

Citations:

CITED BY 2

	Meehae Song , Thomas Elias , Wolfgang Müller-Wittig , Tony K. Y. Chan, Interacting with the virtually recreated Peranakans, Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques in Australasia and South East Asia, February 11-14, 2003, Melbourne, Australia
	Scot Thrane Refsland , Takeo Ojika , Robert Berry, Jr., Enhanced environments: large-scale, real-time ecosystems, Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, v.11 n.3, p.221-246, June 2002