Sex, sleep and scrapping: that's life off the leash in the virtual jungle

Forget Tamagotchis - meet the TechnoSphere. In this three-dimensional "world" created on the Internet by a group of academics, anybody can log on and create his or her own digital animal - and see how it fares in competition with 50,000 others created by previous Internet visitors.

Unlike Tamagotchis, the infernal cybernetic pets now taking over Britain's playgrounds, you don't have to look after your digital creations. You leave them your e-mail address and they keep in touch to tell you when they have mated, given birth, been chased or attacked by another creature - or even died.

"It's a kind of extended family in cyberspace," says Gordon Selley of the London College of Printing, who is technical manager of TechnoSphere.

The record for keeping a Tamagotchi alive is 89 days, but the longest- surviving digital animal has dodged its rivals for 110 so far. That is Fub, a bright-green meat-eating monster with nine eyes and spiky blue wheels, created by a student at the University of Plymouth.

"We decided to create computer-generated creatures which could go into a virtual environment and report back, because we could not afford to send real people into virtual-reality environments," Dr Selley said.

Players can create either a meat-eating or vegetarian creature, using a choice of body parts. After the creature is named and given a contact e-mail address, it is sent into the TechnoSphere environment to interact with the 50,000 other animals.

"Creatures have to search for food, and when they have enough to eat they search for a mate," Dr Selley explained. They also pass time playing, fighting and sleeping. Gender has no role in this world - any creature can mate with any other, and the one that initiated the mating carries the offspring.

The project has been running for three years. This month it won a prize in the Austrian Broadcasting Company's Net category of the Prix Ars Electronica competition for computer-based artwork.. It has been used as a teaching aid in Canadian schools.

"Basically, it's fun," Dr Selley said. "Anybody with access to the Internet and the World Wide Web can engage in TechnoSphere." About 250,000 people worldwide have done so to date.

Technosphere is at http://tdg.linst.ac.uk/technosphere/