Metazoa Ludens: Mixed Reality Interactions and Play for Small Pets and Humans

Introduction

Metazoa Ludens is a revolutionary system that enables humans to play computer games with small animals in a mixed reality environment. The desire to create this human-pet computer game system illustrates a way to reverse the trend of the growing lack of quality time spent between humans and their pets. Hence, the aim is to create a media interface capable of remote human-animal interaction, which takes into consideration the different physiological and psychological make-up between humans and their pets, and the way they may interact with the interface.

Human-animal interaction offers many benefits for both humans and animals [4, 2]. While digital media interaction has been greatly enhanced by the advancement of technology, such interactions are generally restricted to human-human interaction and not extended to promote inter-species interaction. Furthermore, the advancement of technology itself is changing the way people live, demanding longer working hours in order to match up with the higher level of efficiency. Due to this general change in the professional lifestyle [6], humans are out of the house for longer hours and often pets are generally neglected. With this negligence, pets will be deprived of the love and care they require from their human families [7]. Hence, Metazoa Ludens intends to fill in the niche which has been lacking, to provide a way to promote human-animal interaction, locally or remotely, while making use of high-technological advancements to create an environment that augments and enhances such interactivity.

This new interface gives a different form of game play and connectivity between humans and small animals relative to existing ones. With this mixed reality game system, different forms of interaction may be introduced where the small animals (like hamsters) are allowed to “chase after” the human owners in a digital world, hence instead of empowering the pets they get caught up in a compromised situation. Metazoa Ludens hopes to place the hamster on an equal level in the virtual world (which is impossible in the physical world) and allow interaction between human and hamster through a digital interface in a mixed reality manner which is different from the conventional human-animal interaction.

Related Works

Current human-animal interaction between owners and their pets mostly involve simple games to the likes of fetch which do not utilize sophisticated technology. Poultry.Internet [7] and Cat Toy [3] are some interactive systems developed using sophisticated technology for remote human-pet interactions. However, these systems provide only a one-way interaction, and do not allow the owner to interact with their pets in a more emotional and intimate manner.

Building upon all these pet-human interactive systems, Metazoa Ludens brings on a new form of human-animal interaction by extending and augmenting previous systems to allow bidirectional interaction between pet owners and their pet hamsters via playing computer games (locally or remotely). In addition, it incorporates beneficial aspects (such as exercises) to the pets with a built-in method of positive reinforcement, to motivate the pets into performing positive behaviors as well as in the promotion of the awareness of digital human-animal interaction.

Metazoa Ludens

Fig. 1.

System Overview. (© Adrian David Cheok)

In the real world within the big running space of the system, the hamster chases after a physical movable arm on a moldable surface area. The movement of the hamster is then translated into the movement of a pet avatar in the virtual gaming space which is shared by the human. The human controls the movement of a human avatar in the virtual gaming world, which is actually controlling the movement of the physical attractor in the real world. Thus, this loop (see Fig. 1) enables the merging of two realities, both human’s virtual reality and the animal’s physical reality via the Metazoa Ludens system. Further details, pictures and videos of the system can be found at metazoa.mixedrealitylab.org

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