So far, 2021 is a landmark year of nonsense. The meta universe-at this point is not so much an actual entity as a concept-is considered to be the core initiative of Facebook Meta; NFT, in fact, an intangible asset, has its own life, and now, DogPhone Exactly what it sounds like: the dog's phone.

DogPhone was developed by Dr. Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas, a researcher at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, and her 10-year-old Labrador dog Zack. It itself consists of a small ball equipped with a sensor and connected to a laptop. When the dog moves the ball, the "phone" will initiate a video call to the dog's owner (moving the ball can also answer the call if the dog is tilted so).

Although there are a large number of new smart home gadgets designed to allow humans to better control their environment and understand the conditions of their pets when they are alone at home, few people pay attention to providing any agency for actual animals to interact with technology. DogPhone is not for commercial use or distribution. The purpose of its invention is to study the way dogs experience technology and to innovate around its ease of use.

While prototyping the device, Hirskyj-Douglas said in a YouTube video that she tried to improve and study the dog user experience, especially considering how many dogs were placed in new homes during the covid-19 lockdown in 2020, everyone They all saw their mother keeping pets.

"I have been making equipment for my dog ​​and many other dogs for a while," Hirskyj-Douglas said in the video. "I think a lot of these devices are very important for letting the dog choose or do things for rich reasons."

64GB flash memory and 4GB RAM

Although Hirskyj-Douglas said that the initial video call from Zack was "very exciting", in the end he never wanted to talk, which made her very angry-it inevitably made her anxious, because in his life , What's the problem at home. Will not call at regularly scheduled times.

"Towards the end, I became more anxious because sometimes I don’t receive video calls, or he doesn’t call me all day, I think,'Oh, he usually calls me at this time , '" she says.

Can dogs understand what they are doing when they make a video call? When they are not around, do they even experience the high level of human desire to "check" them, or are they content to hang out with us when we are there in person? Do they prefer iOS or Android? Currently, DogPhone asks more questions than it answers.

Not sure if I need my lab to call me all day long.