Play around with this toy starring pixels — called “e” — that live in a 2-dimensional image space. They behave on simple gravity-like rules, but very soon complex “social” patterns and behaviours emerge. Fun for all ages:

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Actually the »e« behave based on only four different simple rules: Sympathy between »e«s, Antipathy if they crash into another, they tend to keep their direction and speed due to their Mass, and Gravity of the darker areas of the screen.

What‘s surprising is how fast this system is totally out of control. But it‘s not chaos, in fact often you can observe very human behaviours: grouping and individualisation, settledness and nomadism, activity and passiveness.

But nevertheless »e« is mainly for the fun in experiment. The user can use the tool bar hidden on the lower edge of the screen to freeze the scene and change several parameters: amount, position, velocity and direction of the »e«s, gravity, atmosphere, etc. You can even load new screen worlds. These worlds are just bitmap images (JPEG, GIF, etc.) and therefore you can easily build your own in any imaging software.

Unfortunatly this is only possible in the downloadable version (Mac OS 9 or PC). If you just want a littly glimpse, you can choose the shockwave version.

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