Inspiration
The inspiration for this project comes from Team Lab’s Graffiti Nature and Beating Earth from Team Lab Phenomena Abu Dhabi. I was inspired by the fact that the installation uses digital ecosystems to create something that feels alive, immersive, and responsive to human presence. The creatures within the installation are soft, glowing, and constantly moving, while the environment does not necessarily feel like an animation, but rather something that feels alive and responds to the things that are happening within it.
This does not simply show moving creatures and plants within an environment; rather, it feels like an entire ecosystem that incorporates life, growth, and death. This became the basis of my project and the reason I choose this visual.
My twist
My initial twist was to introduce the idea of healing versus pollution. While the original project centers on a living, breathing ecosystem, I wanted to take it a step further to highlight the effect of human intervention on such an ecosystem.
In my sketch, I wanted to provide the user with some power. Glowing flower-like seeds, spawn around the canvas and serve as an energy source for the fish. The user also has the power to spawn flowers on click which gives the user a constant choice between helping and damaging the environment. This would enable the fish to thrive and reproduce. On the other hand, I wanted to provide the user with another power: to introduce pollution blobs to the environment. The fish would start avoiding the place of pollution simulating real life where our pollution and wrongdoing force away the creatures, or in this example fish, from their natural habitat. This twist provided more depth to the project. Instead of simply recreating an animated ecosystem, I was able to transform it into a system where the user was responsible for creating a world.
Process
At first I started with the simplest step, the background. I noticed that in the Team Lab space the background had subtle lines that would give the space more depth and maybe try to simulate being under water.
This was done just by using simple lines and playing withe the color and placement. Once I was happy with the background it was time to go onto more exciting stuff and that was adding the fish. At first I was a bit scared of tackling this task as I was afraid simple design would make the project look too bland so I decided to add some glow effect and transparency as well as adding a subtle trail behind the fish to make the project look like a real time piece of art.
After the fish were done it was time for the final steps of adding the seeds spawning and the ability for the user to spawn pollution.
Code I am proud of
One part of the code I am particularly proud of is the logic that allows the fish to detect and move toward the nearest seed. I like this section because it makes the creatures feel more alive and intentional. Instead of moving randomly across the screen, the fish respond to the environment by seeking out glowing seeds, which helps create the feeling of a living digital ecosystem.
// attracted to healthy seeds
let closestSeed = null;
let closestSeedDist = Infinity;
for (let s of seeds) {
if (!s.healing) continue;
let d = dist(this.pos.x, this.pos.y, s.pos.x, s.pos.y);
if (d < closestSeedDist) {
closestSeedDist = d;
closestSeed = s;
}
}
if (closestSeed && closestSeedDist < 180) {
let desired = p5.Vector.sub(closestSeed.pos, this.pos);
desired.setMag(0.12);
this.applyForce(desired);
}
This simple implementation makes the world feel so much more alive and brings my recreation much closer to the original Team Lab project.
Future improvements
I am already really happy with the final result, but if I was to add anything new it would probably be the explosion mechanism that the Team Lab uses. This would be a fun implementation and I could probably use the particle system that we learned in class how to use, but because of the timeframe I decided not to include that in the current state of the project. Overall I am happy with the final result and have learned that recreating someone else’s work with a twist is actually an amazing way to learn and practice p5.