Paper Reading #2: Pet Video Chat: Monitoring and Interacting with Dogs over Distance

Pet Video Chat: Monitoring and Interacting with Dogs over Distance is a research paper presented at CHI 2012 that deals with the maintaining of interactions between pets and their owners remotely. The researchers involved in this work are:

• Jennifer Golbeck: Associated with the University of Maryland in the Human-Computer Interaction research laboratory in College Park, Maryland.
• Carma Neustaedter: Associated with the Simon Fraser University in the School of Interactive Arts + Technology in Vancouver, Canada

Summary

The monitoring system that the researchers used was a rudimentary implementation consisting of a previously-written program combined with Skype. The written program was one in which the remote user is able to control a program designed to attract the attention of pets through three different applications.

Pictured: Poochy-Vision

The first is the Sound Panel interface, in which the user is can choose from twelve different sounds such as rubber duckies, whistling, dog chew toys, meowing cats and howling dogs. The second is a "virtual laser pointer" interface in which the owner can manipulate a bright red dot on a black background remotely. The third is a "Tadpole interface" in which an animation of a tadpole swimming back and forth independently from any user input is shown. Additional sound audio was transmitted for voice communication between the owner and the pet, although video was not used.

The owners were tasked with setting up two computers, one in an area that's easily visible and frequently visited by the pet, and the other in a different room in the house for the owners' use. They were also tasked with some preliminary conditioning of the dogs to determine which of the sounds the dogs responded the best to as well as trying to get them to pay attention to the laser pointer and the tadpole. They were then instructed to leave the room and begin remote communication.

Related Works

Considering the rather odd nature of this particular paper, it was challenging to find at least ten different prior works that deal with this particular technology presented. Nonetheless, the relevant papers that were found were as follows:

1. Pet Internet and Huggy Pajama: A Comparative Analysis of Design Issues 
2. Computer Mediated Remote Touch Communication for Humans and Animals
3. PlayPals: Tangible Interfaces for Remote Communication and Play

The first paper in particular is concerning itself not only with remote communication, but also attempts to establish physical contact remotely between a remote owner and his or her pet via the pet wearing a lightweight jacket "embedded with vibrotactile actuators" that would contract based on how and where the user is touching his or her device remotely. The second paper explores current existing technology related to remote communication between animals and humans, indicating that at the very least this kind of research remains ongoing despite being in its infancy. The third deals with the construction of interfaces (mainly remotely manipulated figurines) to communicate between children. This indicates that remote interactions in this fashion have been attempted before.

Evaluation

Since the test subjects of importance are dogs, it is apparent that the researches had difficulties in presenting their results in purely quantitative results. They did, however, manage to create a table of data outlining "subject ratings" that show levels of pet engagements with the remote visual and audio stimuli.

As can be seen from the table itself, the researchers were able to use this along with qualitative observations of pet reactions to conclude that the laser and the tadpole tests were considerably less engaging overall to a pet attempted to be stimulated remotely. However, the sound engagement and the audio engagement from the voice of the owner remained as the two most reliable ways to engage in the pet.

Overall, the researchers were able to conclude that the experiment resulted in successful stimulation of the pet from a remote location, encouraging the pet to look directly in the owner's line of vision on the laptop's camera, letting the owner see the pet itself remotely. This created a relatively rudimentary, albeit successful line of communication between both the pet and the owner. The researchers believe that although not every test proved successful, the reactions of the animals yielded the belief that it is possible to communicate reliably between owner and pet remotely such that this field of research would be promising.

Discussion

This paper in particular intrigued me since I read the list of papers at the CHI website. The idea that someone would be able to communicate in some way with his or her pet remotely intrigued me, and I was curious to know how the created the technology to achieve this. The conclusion that audio was more engaging to dogs than video seems to make sense upon reflection--a dog instinctively is much more likely to respond in audio cues rather than a small (relatively speaking to the dogs' everyday vision) screen with rudimentary representations of a tadpole and a red laser. I understandably found that the research in this particular area is not too populated with many papers, although I was surprised to find just how little relevant research has been made in this field. The concept may sound silly at first, though with increased research in technology and the pet psychology of how it reacts to remote cues could yield very interesting results.