Dr. Karl Sims made several excellent videos from 3D virtual creatures he evolved in the 90's. His project ran on a Connection Machine, a massively parallel computer containing many CPUs. His innovative work and the fascinating videos that accompany it have left a permanent impression on the imaginations of anyone keen on artificial life and evolutionary computing. Many of the 3DVCE projects since that time have clearly followed in his footsteps, with jointed-cuboid creature bodies that have a similar look and feel to Sims's.

Gerald de Jong has coded up a Java application for evolving virtual creatures. His website has a podcast, several videos, and software you can use. His creatures also evolved in a 3D world, but have quite a different body structure compared to my creatures.

Peter Krcah, in Prague, is working on the evolution of virtual creatures. Like those of Karl Sims, Peter's creatures are controlled by artificial neural networks, whereas mine are controlled by genetic programs. I met Peter at the GECCO 2007 conference. It turns out that he and I are using the same underlying physics engine. Our creatures also encounter the same sorts of problems (traveling by jittering, and sometimes exploding!). He also has videos. Check it out.

Breve is a free open-source simulation environment for 3D multi-agent artificial life simulations in a virtual physical environment, created by Jon Klein. breveCreatures is a screensaver that evolves 3D virtual creatures on your PC.

Nicolas Lassabe, in France, is evolving virtual creatures to perform all sorts of interesting tasks. His creatures have cuboid bodies, like mine, but he uses a different underlying physics engine. He also has a number of cool videos worth watching.

This is a project at Brandeis University by Hod Lipson and Jordan Pollack. They received widespread publicity for this project, which evolved 3D virtual creatures in a simulated physical environment and then used a rapid-prototyping machine to do 3D printing to create the final creatures and put them in the real world. The project page has videos, photos, media coverage, the software, and more!

Framsticks is a 3D virtual creature evolution project that has won numerous awards for being an outstanding piece of software. It allows the user to evolve creatures that are somewhat like 3D stick figures, with various types of sensors, bodies, and behaviors.

This is a project (with source code available for academic and educational purposes) by Thomas Miconi at the University of Birmingham. His software is quite similar to the original Karl Sims work, but he uses a more general approach in terms of the basical materials available to the evolutionary process. For example, many of these sorts of systems include oscillators as ready-made building blocks for evolution to make use of in designing rhymical limb movements for locomotion. But in Thomas' system such things have to evolve from more primitive components.

This web page shows the results of some interesting 3D virtual creature evolution experiments by Nicolas Chaumont at the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences. He used his system to evolve creatures for walking, and for a task unique among these sorts of projects: catapults! The web page includes images and videos of evolved creatures.

This page shows some virtual creatures evolved by Taylor and Massey in 1999/2000. The page divides into those evolved using a system based on the MathEngine physics engine, and another based on the Havok physics engine.

Mike Inside from Austalia has a virtual creature evolution project called "EvoRunners". It uses the PhysX physics engine and OGRE for graphics. Mike's creatures have bodies and control systems that very readily evolve walking and running styles of locomotion.

Keith Wiley at the University of New Mexico, inspired by the work of Karl Sims, has evolved both morphology and control for some 3D virtual creatures using the 3D rendering and ODE physics from Jon Klein's "Breve" (see the BreveCreatures screensaver, above).