Vivarium 🦠

Vivarium is a continuous artificial life sandbox. Every point on the grid looks at a ring of neighbours around it, blends what it sees into a single number, then grows or shrinks based on that number. Do that everywhere, every frame, and lifelike shapes emerge on their own. Named after an enclosure for keeping plants or animals for observation, it is a real-time playground for continuous cellular automata.

⚙️ How It Works

• Browse a massive library of specimens, or set your own growth rules by hand.
• Draw directly on the grid. Click-drag to seed new material, Ctrl/Cmd-drag to erase.
• Watch the ecosystem evolve, or nudge the rules yourself and see what survives.

✨ Key Features

🧬 Reference animals Browse a huge library of gliders, blobs, and stable colonies. Nobody hand-draws these creatures - they emerge purely from mathematical noise and specific growth settings, decoded directly from original published research.

🖌️ Live drawing Paint seeds straight onto the simulation and watch the ecosystem respond and mutate in real time.

🎨 Colour & look A full draggable gradient editor with a range of colour schemes, plus an Emboss mode for a novel look

🌊 Evolve & Modulate Let the core growth parameters drift slowly over time to force the ecosystem to adapt, or modulate them with LFOs to create a living, breathing environment rather than a static one.

🌱 Auto-seed Keep dropping fresh material into the pattern on a steady rhythm. A field that's died out completely has nothing left to grow back from, so it needs a nudge to restart.

🔍 Resolution control From chunky and fast to sharp and computationally heavy, the grid size is yours to choose.

🌗 Light & Dark Matches your system, or choose manually.

No goals, no timers, no wrong answers. Just the grid, finding its own shape.

🧮 The maths and credits, for anyone curious

Vivarium implements Lenia, a system of continuous cellular automata. Unlike Conway's Game of Life which uses a discrete grid and binary states (alive/dead), Lenia uses continuous space, continuous time, and continuous states. The entire visual vocabulary of the app (from simple gliders to complex, swirling swarms) comes purely from tuning the growth centre (μ) and growth width (σ). Colour is applied only at render time; it never feeds back into the simulation itself.

The Lenia model, and the hundreds of reference animal patterns this app ships with, come directly from the published research of Bert Wang-Chak Chan. The patterns were decoded directly from his published data and reference implementation - see Chakazul/Lenia

This app does not claim to improve on or replace that research; rather, it is a modern, interactive UI and rendering shell built around the exact same model and specimens to make them explorable in real-time.