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 seperate species after infamous inmates of Alcatraz (anagrams or last names). The prison behavior of fighting and banding together seemed to coincide perfectly with the theme as well.

The Technology

I will walk you through a typical user situation, including the technology used :

1. Person takes a camera phone picture of one of the images above, or from the kiosk at the installation
2. That image is sent to spawn@cell-ular.com which fowards to Mobot.
3. Mobot recognizes the image and sends a hit to my PHP page with GET variables.(If the image is not recognized the user gets a message stating it doesn't know what it is)
4. The user is pinged back with an SMS stating "They have given life to a *creature type* named *name* ( the names are from a random array).
5. The data sent via get by Mobot is stored into my database.
6. The visualization written in Processing pulls from my database every few seconds. So it will see the new creature in the table row and trigger it's birth on screen.
7. The creature will exist until killed by another species(they each have health bars and will fight), at which time the user will be notified via SMS again. inviting him/her to snap a shot of another creature.