When Farmville Just Isn't Real Enough

Courtesy of boingboing.net I stumbled upon a fantastic new research project this week, Playing with Pigs.

Playing with Pigs, a Dutch project, explains that "Designing new forms of human-pig interaction can create the opportunity for consumers and pigs to forge new relations as well as to experience the cognitive capabilities of each other."



Their first game is quite simple: a human with a tablet can see a foggy image of any pig which is close enough to large, touch-sensitive screen in their pen. The human moves a glowing spot around his or her screen, trying to get the pigs to touch their snouts to the corresponding glowing ball on the pig-side display.

Like the Orangutan iPad story this seems silly but there is actually lot more to it.

Pigs in captivity are known to suffer from boredom, which often leads to physical issues and aggression. In 2001 the EU passed regulations requiring farmers to provide some form of stimulus for the pigs - nothing extreme, even just sawdust to root would do, although toys or other manipulable elements in their environment also apparently work quite well.

Playing with Pigs is a research project to both examine to what levels humans and animals can interact electronically and to find new ways to keep domestic pigs happy and healthy.

You can see the game system in action in this video, courtesy of the Playing with Pigs project (as are all the photos in this post):

Playing with Pigs: Pig Chase from Utrecht School of the Arts on Vimeo.