Querying across time to interactively evolve animations

Abstract

Compositional Pattern Producing Networks (CPPNs) are a generative encoding that has been used to evolve a variety of novel artifacts, such as 2D images, 3D shapes, audio timbres, soft robots, and neural networks. This paper takes systems that generate static 2D images and 3D shapes with CPPNs and introduces a time input, allowing each CPPN to produce a different set of results for each slice of time. Displaying the results in sequence creates smooth animations that can be interactively evolved to suit users' personal aesthetic preferences. A human subject study involving 40 individuals was conducted to demonstrate that people find the dynamic animations more complex than static outputs, and find interactive evolution of animations more enjoyable than evolution of static outputs. The novel idea of indirectly generating artifacts as a function of time could also be useful in other domains.