The Realm: Immersive Entropy

"_Imagine a sky filled with flocking starlings: tens of thousands of birds twisting and turning on the wing, moving as a fluid mass and never bumping into each other. It is an incredible feat and a beautiful sight._

_Then imagine that you can enter a world where you can orchestrate this feat, where the flocking creatures respond to your presence and your actions._

_**The Realm**_ _is that world - an imaginative immersive experience inspired by the aesthetics of collective natural phenomena._

_Co-created by users,_ **_The Realm_** _aims to engage audiences through generative art and immersive technologies. Each 'player' observes, interacts and affects collective motion from within a dynamic virtual environment, where multiple biologically inspired 'agents' reside. Players feel their way intuitively, gradually evolving a language of social interaction through experimentation in gesture, sound and social cues. Individual interactions will affect collective actions, enabling the player to orchestrate a swarm, drive a herd or attract a colony. Starting from the same base models and algorithms, behavioural patterns will emerge uniquely through a feedback loop of complex interactions between agents and players, generated in real time._

_The visual character of the agents will evolve through interaction, as will the surrounding imaginary landscape. The 'collective' may appear as cellular forms, winged spheres or abstract organisms; the topography as contours, planes or enclosed spaces - depending on the behaviour of users and the nature of the interactions between human and digital beings. From simple elements, complex behaviours will emerge._

_Generative programming will enable the experience to gradually evolve. Within a virtual world of image and sound, populations of imaginary creatures will respond to your presence and your cues. A binaural soundscape will subtly direct social cues and encourage auditory interaction._

_As you intuitively test your influence on the creatures in the system you begin to develop your own communicative code - no two users will have the exact same experience and no single user will have the same experience twice._

_Through trial and error, body movements, gestures and sounds will develop an intuitive responsive language - a simple set of codes and signals which trigger reactions and influence the landscape, the soundscape and unfolding narrative... leading to spontaneous coordinated collective motion._

_This is the future of immersive arts, no longer a static, passive or isolating experience, but instead an exhilarating, thought provoking and aesthetically rewarding journey of discovery, where each user affects the evolution._"