Complex systems made of nonlinear interacting cells are gaining ever and ever interest. An universal environment for the study these systems should provide to the user the possibility of defining the dynamics of the cells as well as the connections among them in a simple and flexible way. In this paper the main characteristics of E∧3, an universal emulator of complex systems, are discussed. This simulator is based on the paradigm of Cellular Nonlinear Network and makes use of parallel computing allowing to considerably extend the size of the simulated system. Each cell is conceived as anth‐order dynamical system. Moreover, numerical results obtained by emulating a complex system made of a large number (more than 500000) of interacting chaotic units arranged in a 3D lattice are presented. These simulations show an emerging result: organized forms and structure arise from the dynamic evolution of such systems. © 2004 American Institute of Physics