Date 05/18/2019
Title Interactive Immune System
Introduction By making this project, I expect it to simulate how human immune system works. User can click to add pathogens, and see how different kinds of cells cooperate to eliminate them from the system. As the color and size of the pathogens created change, the cells show different behaviors to cope with the situation.
Concepts Involved The major concept I utilized in this project was autonomous agent. All the objects that are able to seek other objects are autonomous agents with a seek method. Collision happens between cells and between pathogens. Sine function was also used a lot in this project to produce an organic growing – shrinking effect of the cells. Except the phagocyte and the T cell, all other objects have a lifespan, and when their lifespan is done they are removed from the system.
Principle Just to be clear, compared to what actually happens in human body, I simplified the process in my project. Once a pathogen (in this case, the virus that you create) appears in the canvas, the phagocyte (the yellow/orange-ish cell) comes to “eat” it. If the pathogen is larger in size than the phagocyte, then the latter requests assistance from its fellow cell – T lymphocyte (aka T cell, the purple one), by sending it the antigen (the little round thing that has the same color as the pathogen) of the pathogen. This way, the T cell receives information about the virus and accordingly generates a B cell (the green one), which subsequently produces a lot of antibodies that are targeted at the pathogen.
What’s very interesting is that, all antibodies are specially produced to kill only the type of pathogens that it is assigned. In biology, this process is called “adaptive” or “specific” immune reaction. I implemented this by giving antibodies the same color as their target pathogens, so if you pay attention you can see that a pathogen does not get killed by an antibody if their colors don’t match.
Aesthetics I picked this red/pink-ish color to be the background as it gives me a sense of what it feels like inside human body. As the “war” between pathogens and your immune cells gets more intense, the color darkens. For the cells, I specifically picked colors with less saturation so that they wouldn’t clash with their different hues. Also, I really enjoy watching the T cell and B cells grow and shrink as if they are live objects inhaling and exhaling. I added shadows to all objects by drawing a black ellipse beneath each of them. To make the process more understandable, I added an “Annotation” boolean that enables user to see information of the objects.
Presentation The comment that I heard the most on this project is that it is very educative. That was not my intention, but it was nice hearing so. A big thank you to professor Moon for making me present this project on the IMA show! I was hesitating at first as I thought I wouldn’t have time for it, but I was so glad that I eventually did because it felt good hearing people’s compliments 🙂
Resources It took some reviewing before working on this project because I barely remembered anything I learned in high school about immune system. Below are two materials that I referred to during the production of the project.