BugMirror

BugMirror is a very simple idea; nowadays screens are made out of pixels. What if pixels were living creatures instead of being little squares fixed in their position? That’s what BugMirror tries to explore, as it proposes a screen made of thousands of little bugs.

The bugs react to camera input, trying to mimic what the camera sees. They have freedom to walk around and change their color. This creates a low-precision slow-reacting mirror, giving it a very organic and unique feeling.

Every single Bug thinks locally, just reacting to its surroundings (that is, the camera’s input pixels that fall near to it). But the fact that there are thousands of them, all of them thinking on their own, makes the whole bug community work as a single entity.
Bug Mirror is currently a work in progress.

After tweaking more and more the bug’s brains, they react much faster now! See the video of the latest version here.

Update: You can now download it as a screensaver here.