"TechnoSphere" by Gordon Selley, Rycharde Hawkes und Jane Prophet enables the user to put form a creature from a variety of heads, bodies, and members, to give her a name and to communicate with it.

"TechnoSphere" is an Internet-based artificial life simulator allowing people to create their own creatures and communicate with them as they grow, evolve, and die in a virtual 3D environment. The WWW interface allows users to make a new life form, register it with the system, and retrieve information about their creatures.

The Artificial Life Environment is a program that stores the artificial life forms and calculates their interactions with each other and the environment (modelled in 3D). It supports the reproduction and evolution of life forms. User requests made from the Web Server are processed here and the relevant information passed onto the rendering and email engines. The artificial life forms ­ which can be either herbivores or carnivores ­ grow, seek food and mates, chase and evade each other, and produce offspring that are variants on their parents.

The simulation includes the environment (a 16 km-square mountainous terrain with substantial plains), animals, and vegetation. It is possible to create many different types of vegetation within "TechnoSphere", but only one type has been provided thus far. The two basic classes of animals are herbivores and carnivores. There is scope for many specialisations of these two classes, but only two have been made available to the general public thus far: grazer and prowler. Grazers spend their lives wandering the plains, searching for food and companionship, whilst avoiding the insatiable appetites of prowlers. Companionship is sought in the form of other grazers who, for the most part, share a similar appearance. A prowler's existence is similar except that they prey on the grazers for food rather than plants.

Animals can be created by user, or by the simulation as offspring of creatures created by the users. Creatures start life as children, progress through adulthood, old age and eventually die, becoming another food supply for the carnivores. The artificial life environment allows creatures to mate, the offspring taking a mixture of physical and functional attributes from both of its parents. The animals that are the result of this mating start their existence in "TechnoSphere" as a foetus, which gestates over a number of weeks, until the animal carrying them gives birth. When an animals carcass has either been picked clean or has rotted away to nothing, the animals information is removed from the simulation state.

Each animal created by a user is given that user's email address. All children born of that animal will inherit that email address, as will their children, and their children's children, etc. This means that users are kept in contact with their immediate family without the need for further action.Our aim has been to produce an online environment where users can experiment and engage with artificial life forms for fun or more serious purposes. "TechnoSphere" is popular with most Internet users ranging from children to scientists working in the area, its appeal is global and not limited to certain age groups.

One goal is to bring the user closer to the virtual world with the use of interface tools. Users receive email from their creatures at key moments in their lives which prompts the user to investigate the situation by using the online tools. Creatures may live up to three real world months emailing the person who created them roughly once a day. This long term, but at arms distance, relationship between the user and their creations has proved very popular.

"TechnoSphere" has a large user base of 100,000 people from around the world During a typical 10 day period "TechnoSphere" has 750,000 WWW hits, and serves 2Gigabytes of information to 40,000 users.