about | About The Project |
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Swarm Toolkit is about enabling groups of individuals to use the power of their collective creativity to solve problems, create new experiences and have fun. The project will do this by exploring swarms: groups of many autonomous individuals, each with their own objectives, values and identities coming together to achieve a common goal or a shared behaviour. Swarms are self-organising structures arising from the local relationships of these communities. The fact that the organisational structure is emergent rather than enforced gives the members of a swarm unique ownership and power over its actions. Network technologies can enable the proliferation of these highly dynamic social groupings. Swarm Toolkit explores the evolution of swarms enabled by pervasive media networks and analyses what they might mean for game play and social organisation within urban spaces. The project is funded by the Pervasive Media Lab as part of the Media Sandbox Commissioning Scheme. The project is led by Simons Evans and Johnson in partnership with HP Labs. The project is looking at the dynamics of swarms, how they emerge and how they maintain coherence. Using this research data, the team will design and develop a pervasive media tool-kit based upon HPs mscape pervasive media authoring environment. The objective is to enable game developers and media creators to work with swarms and the kind of distributed intelligence they represent. As part of designing and testing the tool-kit, the Swarm team will develop a Swarm game and trial it somewhere in Bristol. |
