Biotopy is a collaborative project by Will Freudenheim, Wendi Yan, and Darren Zhu, with R&D contributions from Jessica Shand and Omar Rizwan
*For more information about the project, please visit https://biotopy.org/*
Short Description / Excerpt
Biotopy is a biotic game and interactive installation that speculates a more playful and collective mode of scientific discovery. Connecting bioreactors to game engines, it synthesizes scientific methods with gameplay mechanics. Players are citizen scientists, growing and interacting with microbial cultures to take care of a virtual creature on their computer. Biotopy is a playful interface mediating between the biotic and the digital, generating a novel space for both play and discovery.
Introduction
Biotopy at NEW INC’s Creative Science Dinner, October 26, 2024.
Partly an artistic game, partly a philosophical experiment, and partly a tech demo, Biotopy is a bio-digital interface that speculates on a more playful mode of scientific discovery. Coming from the fields of synthetic biology, history of science, game design, and procedural music, our team has been developing this project to explore a symbiotic mode of scientific inquiry.
We shared our initial research at Harvard’s Unfiguring Conference on experimental methodologies in March 2024 and later debuted the game installation at NEW INC’s Creative Science Dinner in October 2024. We’re now expanding Biotopy into a multiplayer format and kit, hoping to present it in a variety of venues to spark conversations about gameplay and decentralized science-making.
The hardware setup of Biotopy uses the Pioreactor, a DIY bioreactor system running on a Raspberry Pi. This setup allows citizen scientists to carry out chemical and biological reactions at home. Each Pioreactor includes a custom web interface and can be linked with multiple units to handle everything from growing continuous yeast cultures with turbidostats to simulating day-night cycles for algae using LEDs. Through real-time measurements and controls, we can adapt these experiments to the precise needs of each organism.
Connecting Pioreactors to Unreal Engine—an engine for making AAA-level games—allows the real-time biological growth data inside the Pioreactor to be fed into the game engine as data animating 3D models and other game assets. The Biotopy game, hence, achieves a real-time bio-digital interface that allows game events to command the bioreactor, and to have the microbial growth manipulate the virtual universe simultaneously. The question opens about how to render such activities and design them into engaging gameplay that facilitates discovery.
A thought experiment externalized as a playable prototype, Biotopy provokes questions of how biotic agents will live with digital universes, how scientific discoveries could be facilitated through collective play, and how we might practice a more expansive scientific self.
The pipeline of Biotopy achieved in the R&D stage from bioreactor data to 3D visualization in Unreal Engine.
Current interface of the Biotopy game. The game has two game modes, one for yeast and one for algae. This image shows the algae interface with the unique option to turn on/off the LED for the day/night cycles.
A New Form of Citizen Science