![]() The code and circuit board designs are all open source of course. The design and build of the tangible interface were made in collaboration with Aaron and his brilliant woodworking skills, and the pieces for the final version were cut on his enormous self-made CNC machine the St. The first Viruscraft workshop made an appearance in Blueprint magazine, and another interesting unexpected outcome from the project has been that one of the original workshop participants, Aaron Moore, ended up creating a whole range of virus-inspired items, including a virus shaped lampshade which we now use in the installations (he also made a virus shaped chair and. You can see more photos and videos for the project. We then held an open workshop in April 2018 for testing and improving the prototype version, and finished with an open event for testing the full version with visitors at the Eden Project in Jan 2019. We launched with a workshop in April 2017 to co-research virus genetics and structure, and use craft approaches to explore ways of building modifiable viral structures for informing the tangible interface design. Viruscraft was developed through a series of open workshops. When the shapes are changed, this is automatically detected using photointerrupter sensors on the virus itself, and simple barcodes on the bases of the plug-in shapes: The tangible interface is a large wood virus with lots of plug in shapes - these plug in shapes represent the proteins on the surface of the viruses. The other form is a tangible interface system for exhibition use. There are two forms of the game - one is screen based (see link above) and looks like this: Players must avoid killing off all the host species, or their virus will die too. The aim is to keep your virus alive as long as possible by evolving to infect new hosts. When the shapes on the virus match a host creature on the planet, infection can take place. The game is played from the perspective of a virus - players evolve their virus by changing the shapes on its surface. We designed Viruscraft to allow anyone to explore how viruses evolve and jump between host species - the game is based on real host-parasite evolutionary dynamics. ![]() In real life this happens all the time, like the bird flu virus mutating to infect humans. To keep up with this change, or to move into a new host species, viruses have to evolve their own surface shapes. To avoid infection, hosts evolve to change the shapes on the outside of their cells. If they match (a bit like a key fitting into a lock), infection can take place. The shapes on the virus fit into similar shapes on the surface of host cells. These structures are coated with tiny shapes made from proteins. If you zoomed in enough, you would see that viruses are geometric structures. Viruscraft II was later developed with Dr. Ben Longdon, who is finding out what determines the ability of a virus to jump into new host species. Viruscraft began as a Wellcome Trust funded research project combining tangible interfaces, craft and computer games to explore the work of evolutionary biologist Dr.
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