If you liked James Auger/Jimmy Loizeau’s Augmented Animals and Natalie Jeremijenko’s Ooz project, an experiment in “interspecies communication,” you might love this new concept:

Metazoa Ludens is a computer gaming environment which allows pets to play mixed reality games with humans via custom built technologies and applications.

Humans can mostly passively map and analyze the data that is coming as the result of the technological implications on societies. Metazoa Ludens searches for new moments that solve this problem by placing animals as one of the new elements in this cycle. How can a living creature make changes to robust technologically driven systems? What are the possible outcomes of this combination? To answer these questions, the Metazoa Ludens team creates simulations, analytic models, and prototypes that will bear new results and implications. The first game enables hamsters to have a superior position compared to the humans’ position in the game. The overall aims for these types of games are to provide new beneficial relations, communications, interactions, progressions, and the evolution of the Metazoa species.

Part of ISEA 2006 in San José, the work is being developed by Vladimir Todorovic, Adrian Cheok (who led the Human Pacman and the marvelous Internet Poultry projects at the Mixed reality Lab in Singapore), and Goran Andrejin.