Wayfaring Swarms is a multi-player interactive art installation combining simulation and a technological construct to enable players’ free hand gestural interaction. Artistic investigation pursues playability based upon the most fundamental behavioral and temporal tendencies encoded in biology and cognition: attraction and repulsion, reflex and recovery.

The simulation is based on agents’ swarm like, low level self organization, a type of algorithm often used in evolutionary biological computing. A set of simple kinetic rules is applied to steer swarm agents’ motion. each agent having its own kinetic parameters so that several different types can be mixed into a heterogeneous population. The installation architecture combines the simulation with tangible displays, data-driven visualization and sonification, robots, and sensors. The piece features an extended technique for interaction design by routing signals through three perceptual models, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Physical Reality, by interfacing three types of agents through computational representation.