Metazoa Ludens: Mixed-Reality Interaction and Play for Small Pets and Humans

Cheok, A.D.; Tan, R.T.K.C.; Peiris, R.L.; Fernando, O.N.N.; Soon, J.T.K.; Wijesena, I.J.P.; Sen, J.Y.P. (2011). “Metazoa Ludens: Mixed-Reality Interaction and Play for Small Pets and Humans,” Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Part A: Systems and Humans, IEEE Transactions, 41(5), pp.876-891

This paper, maybe due to its computer science discourses, offers little in the way of critical reflection to help feed into this study. However it does offer an extensive literature review of related works which has been fruitful in finding a wide range of existing Animal-Computer Interaction research. The research has a range of research methodologies for assessing the success of the project, and seems to split the assessment methods between the animal and human subjects. The research draws Csikszentmihalyi work with FLOW to assess the games success, which narrows the success criteria and applies anthropocentric metrics to the game artifact.

However, this is an interesting and often cited study which has helped to direct the research towards some overlooked projects in mixed reality interspecies design(listed below) often with tangible and haptic interfaces. This has been a valuable contribution to the consideration of non-anthropocentric interface design.

Projects

Poultry.Internet http://mixedrealitylab.org/projects/all-projects/poultry-internet/

Petting Zoo http://metahuman.bitbucket.org/web/pzoo1.html

iPet Companion http://www.ipetcompanion.com/

Infiltrate http://goldberg.berkeley.edu/art/infiltrate/

Rover@Home http://characters.media.mit.edu/projects/roverhome.html

Cricket-Controlled Pacman http://www.engadget.com/2006/07/03/cricket-controlled-pac-man/