What if Eye...?

We created a virtual petri dish where digital creatures evolve eyes from scratch, replaying millions of years of evolution. Starting with a single light-detecting cell, our digital creatures face challenges that shaped real eyes over millions of years: navigating the world, discerning food from poison, and evading predators. Our digital creatures evolve different eyes based on survival needs - compound-like eyes for navigation, camera-like eyes for food and poison discrimination. Our creatures independently discover solutions that nature found - like lenses that focus light - emerging naturally to balance survival pressures and physical constraints of their environment. Kushagra Tiwary*, Aaron Young*, Zaid Tasneem, Tzofi Klinghoffer, Akshat Dave, Tomaso Poggio, Dan-Eric Nilsson, Brian Cheung **, Ramesh Raskar ** We computationally recreate the vision evolution to study what-if scenarios that never happened in nature and understand the principles behind biological vision evolution. * Eq

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• Yoyo Yuan