What is Metazoa Ludens?
Metazoa means multicellular organism or animals.
Ludens come from the phrase Homo Ludens which means to play.
Putting them together, Metazoa Ludens means to play with animals.
Technological advancement has changed the way we do things, for example snail mail takes days to be delivered while email as brought forth by technology is almost instant.
Nevertheless there is not much new development for the ways humans interact with animals using advanced technology. With Metazoa Ludens, we hope that we could harness the powers of advanced technology and start new ways of interacting with animals.
Metazoa Ludens
High Resolution Pictures for Press and Media Usage
Images : http://www.twango.com/channel/mxrlab.mludens
Video : http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-53878662255332816
Press Release: http://www.twango.com/media/mxrlab.mludens/mxrlab.10657
Research paper: http://media.twango.com/m1/original/0047/80c276b419974fca95809fee08d0315c.pdf
Flowchart: http://www.twango.com/media/mxrlab.mludens/mxrlab.10339
Web : http://metazoaludens.wikidot.com
Pictures for Press and Media Usage: http://www.mixedrealitylab.org/MEDIA/newspaper/Pictures_For_Press.zip
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 are 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 (hamster) was examined based on Csikszentmihalyi's Flow theory. Results of both studies inform of positive remote interaction between human user 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 project as a framework in general for human to animal interaction systems.
Interactive Storyboard:
Video (last updated 14/03/07, right-click and download file)
Metazoa Ludens 14_03_2007.mov (32.3MB)
Exhibition History:
Accepted for publication in Workshop for Edutainment 2006, Hangzhou, China
Accepted for Sketches, SIGGRAPH 2006, Boston, USA
Accepted for publication in Lecture Notes of Computer Science 2007
Accepted for DEMO in Wired NextFest 2007, LA, USA
Please see photos and videos at these links:
Images : http://www.twango.com/channel/mxrlab.mludens
Video : http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-53878662255332816
Technical Document
Charith Fernando, a member of the Metazoa Ludens project has published a technical documentation. Click here to view the documentation.
Team
Adrian David Cheok, Roger Thomas Tan, Newton Fernardo, Roshan Peiris, Janaka Prasad, Janyn Sen Yin Ping
Last Updated ( Wednesday, 17 October 2007 )
For more information please visit the official Metazoa Ludens site at:
http://metazoa.mixedrealitylab.org
