In 2004, a new Centre for Usable Home Technology was launched at York. As part of the launch event, a virtual augmented environment was promised - but upon inspection the PenPets demo, which had been considered, was found to be unreliable outside a laboratory environment, and almost impossible to maintain with no developer available with any experience with the code. In order to provide a demo, Hyde and Parnham, in their own time, went away and using all that had been learned in the years of development of the various group project, designed and built a new interactive aLife demo from scratch in the space of a week. As PenPets had never made it beyond experimental prototype stage, they decided to bite the bullet and rather than building just a demo instead built a basic but extensible generic augmented reality framework upon which an aLife demo could be run. This framework became the core of the OpenIllusionist Project.