Microphone in hand, Casey Blake tries to coax a little gray wolf pup to life.

“Wake up ... wake up,” she says.

In front of her, projected onto a 5-by 7-foot white screen, the virtual puppy’s ear twitches. But his animated body slumbers on.

“You might have to speak louder,” says Bill Tomlinson who stands nearby. Tomlinson’s the creative brain behind “AlphaWolf,” the interactive computer exhibit on display through Oct. 15 at Arizona State University’s Computing Commons Gallery.

“Wake up,” Blake repeats. She tries barking into the mike.
The puppy responds. He yawns then stretches. Blake howls. A half-second later, the puppy mimics her and lopes off to find his littermates.

Standing to either side of Blake, Simon Yau and Brooke Grucella bark and whine into microphones of their own, each controlling one of the two other virtual pups in the pack.

The three meet up on screen. As Yau whines, his white puppy assumes a submissive posture before the black one, controlled by Grucella.

All the barking, howling, growling and whining wakes up one of the three adult wolves, a free-roaming artificial intelligence that comes to break up the puppies’ play. Tails between their legs, the youngsters skitter off.

“You can’t dominate the adults,” Tomlinson says. “Because they’re grown-ups.”

It takes five PCs to run “AlphaWolf,” which Tomlinson created while he was working on his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lab with eight students and one faculty member. The completed work debuted in August 2001 at Siggraph in Los Angeles — the world’s biggest computer graphic conference. It’s been shown six times since.

The wolves were animated using 3D Studio Max and the programs were written in Java. But the current version, Tomlinson says, “is using a Direct X graphics system with a bit of C code.”

The computer simulation runs in five minute loops, during which, Tomlinson says, “the wolves are aging. They’re getting bigger.” When they reach adulthood, all six wolves in the pack come together for a communal howl. Then the screen goes dark and a new litter of sleeping pups are “born.”

“The ones that we just raised,” Tomlinson says, “become the next generation of adults and keep the same relationships.”

Participants can keep track of those relationships by referring to icons of the other pups at the bottom of each screen. Clicking on a mouse directs the wolves in their limited actions.

“Sometimes people say, ‘Do they sniff each other?’ Which is a behavior people expect of wolves,” Tomlinson says.

But Tomlinson and his M.I.T. team couldn’t program in all the social nuances of a wolf-pack — that would have been too complex. So the team limited the animals to a narrow scope of behaviors.

“With these wolves we focused just on the social relationships of dominance and submission,” Tomlinson says.

The wolves interact in a sparse, gray, misty plane surrounded by a ghostly halo of trees. The team created a landscape that evoked a wolf’s natural habitat. “We tried to have it look kind of like the arctic tundra,” Tomlinson says.

He and his team deliberately left the environment mostly blank. They wanted the participants to focus solely on the interaction and relationships between the wolves.

“That’s the challenge of doing an installation,” Tomlinson says. “To get people to focus on the interaction that we want them to focus on.”

But the biggest challenge for the participants might be getting over the fear of picking up a mike and howling like a wolf.

“People seem to like it better when they’re in a group,” Tomlinson says. “You don’t walk into a darkened room by yourself and make wolf noises ... that brands you as a weirdo.”

Alone or not, the installation is both fun and educational.

“People,” Tomlinson says, “especially friends, have a great time howling together.”