Telepresence, to say nothing of digital interaction, is already a part of the board room and the bedroom. It stands to reason it belongs in the cat room too. And now, of course, it does.Like many good ideas, the thought of playing with a cat using a robotic arm controlled remotely over the Internet began with more industrial aspirations in mind. In this case, it started with Apriori Control, a Boise, Idaho based company that makes technology for remotely operating machinery. Last year, writes Anna Jane Grossman at City Room, an engineer for Apiori lost a night of work to playing with his cat, who had taken an interest in the prototype arm he was working on. Scott Harris, Apiori’s owner, isn’t a pet person, but his interest was piqued. “Well, if you had fun,” he asked his engineer, “what would normal people think?”Harris donated the first version of what he calls iPetCompanion to the Idaho Humane Society. Within the first two weeks, the humane society's Web site traffic went up astronomically, and adoptions rose. People really liked the technology, and the cats did too. Now two hundred shelters have put in requests for the system, but there’s only one on the East Coast for now, at the Bidawee shelter in New York City. Its use is restricted to two minutes per anonymous human user, but there are no limits on cat playtime.Now Harris is working on other technologies for improving animal-human interaction, including a Web-operated ball launcher, and a device to feed lions at zoos remotely. In Idaho, an aquarium is developing a robotic submarine that can be controlled online and swim with penguins.For humans, especially those of us with cat allergies, the system is intriguing, if bizarre. For adoption centers, it could prove to be just the thing to coax anxious potential owners into considering the virtues of real-life ownership (provided, of course, they can coax obsessives off the system long enough to let others try it out). For animals, the virtues are obvious — more games and perhaps more exercise.But the risks of this cat and mouse game are murkier. Can a windshield wiper with a pink feather replace the touch of a human hand? Will lazy cat-owners see fit to manage their cat time from the comfort of the computer room? Could iPetCompanion mark a brave new era in our interaction with pets? Perhaps it will cause us to think about what that purpose that interaction serves, and allow us to better measure and systematically improve it. Social pet games may proliferate. An array of new devices for Fido will come to market, especially if Apple can find a way to wrestle “iPet” away from Harris. The only voices missing in the whole affair are those of the dogs don’t know what a web cam is, and the cats likely have no idea how popular they are on reddit. Until that problem can be fixed, we have a new way of distracting them and ourselves.viaCity Room
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