Metazoa Ludens: Mixed reality interaction and play between humans and animals

Abstract

Although animals and pets are so important for families and society, in modern urban lifestyles we can spend little time with our animal friends. Interactive media should be aimed to enhance not only human-to-human communication, but also human-to-animal communication. Thus, we promote a new type of inter-species media interaction which allows human users to interact and play with their small pet friends (in this case hamsters) remotely via the Internet through a mixed reality based game system Metazoa Ludens. We scientifically examined the effectiveness of this system in a two-pronged approach. Firstly and most importantly, the positive effects to the hamsters were ensured using Body Condition Score study. Secondly, the method of Duncan was used to assess the strength of preference of the hamsters towards Metazoa Ludens. Lastly, the effectiveness of this remote interaction with respect to the human users as a interactive gaming system with their pets/friends (hamsters) was examined based on Csikszentmihalyi's (Beyond boredom and anxiety, 1975) Flow theory. The results of both studies inform of positive remote interaction between human users and their pet friends using our research system. This research is not aimed just at providing specific experimental results on the implemented research system, but is aimed as a wider lesson for human-to-animal interactive media. Thus also the lessons learned are extrapolated and detailed in this chapter as a framework in general for human-to-animal interaction systems. © 2010 Springer-Verlag London Limited.