In response to this article, we created a page, “Pets and Other Animals Interacting With Robotic Virtual Pets and Other Robots“, pulling together several sources of information on interactions between real pets, wildlife, birds, and other animals with robotic animals and similar devices. It includes several very interesting videos, scientific research, and anecdotal evidence.

Now Disney wants to pull the plug. Some think to run users over to similar Disney sites requiring users to pay, like Club Penguin and ToonTown.

Users are mixing real and imaginary efforts to attempt to stop the closing of their beloved park.

Is this the first case of digital reverse evolution? (Going from a virtual community to an plush pet instead of from a plush pet to a virtual community).

A 26 September 2007 Nickelodeon & Viacom Consumer Products (NVCP owns Neopets) press release announced they signed a licensing agreement with JAKKS to create a plush line of toys based on Neopets. They call it a collectable roll out strategy and say JAKKS will create new ways to interact with the site in the months ahead (maybe they will use some of the concepts we have mentioned in the past to better integrate the plush toys?) .

Neopets began with an online virtual community. As they began to add merchandise, they started selling traditional plush pets. Now that everybody else is launching virtual communities based on plush pets you purchase for the secret codes (tokens) to enter their virtual community, it sounds like Neopets is going to back up another step and follow suit.

The new plush Neopets are expected to hit the stores in early spring 2008. The plush toys will contain codes that allow players to unlock virtual extensions of the toys to use as part of their Neopets Key Quest experience. (sound familiar?). They say the plush pets are part of their “multplatform strategy”.

Sounds a little more like they (or their major stockholders) think they may have left some money on the table and are coming back to get it.

An example of one of the current (non token containing) Neopet plush pets is shown above. It is currently available from Amazon. The press release does not specifically say a plush pet will be required for entry, but points out they will be required to unlock virtual extensions of their plush pets. You may still be able to enter without one?

With the continued rash of entries into the plush pet virtual community category, Neopets may be able to bring some real innovation to the category through JAKKS who has also been involved in several interactive toys. We hope so. In their haste to hit the streets in a hurry, they may just copy everybody else and sell standard plush pets with a code on them as Generation I. Maybe Gen II will open some new doors. Time will tell.

JAKKS recent list of signed licenses is very impressive. It can’t help but make us think of the history of Dream Pets and the companies involved. We sure hope JAKKS comes out better than Applause did. We also hope all the new signings don’t detract too much from the time they have available to work on truly interactive Neopet plush pet designs.

A dog’s bark is picked up from a small microphone on his collar and echoed to the main device (using a process called Sound Forwarding), the sound is analyzed, and the voice translation is displayed on the screen.

Dr. Norio Kogure, director of Kogure Animal Hospital, provided expert advice on animal behavior. Sounds are divided into six categories: happy, sad, frustrated, angry, assertion, and desire. You can even record your dogs emotions while you are gone.

Bowlingual has a datanalysis feature that compiles information on your dog over time to improve communication, and form a “doggie diary.”

It allows you to enter the dog’s name, breed, gender and birth date to improve the translation. In addition it provides training tips, offers health advice, and includes a timer.

Bowlingual was later sold in an English version in the U.S. for about $120.

With Bowlingual being a big hit, Takara followed up with a similar product for cats. Meowlingual was announced in a 1 December 2003 press release.

Bowlingual was a tremendous success in Japan and received and almost unbelievable amount of publicity in the United States. Millions of people own dogs and were fascinated with the concept of a device interpreting their barks. Hundreds of publications ran brief articles about the device when it was first released.

We are still working on our efforts to write a history of virtual pets. As part of that effort we are trying to understand how all the different types fit in with one another, with real life and with other things that may have influenced them. Bowlingual and Meowlingual play an interesting role, as they are two of the few objects to go back the other way. They use small handheld electronic devices very reminiscent of keychain virtual pets to interact with real life, vs. real life interacting with a virtual pet.

Released back in early 2005, we include Choro Mode Pet here due to its unique method of control. A little cable connects the small robotic pet to the headphone jack of a Japanese mobile phone. The pet is then controlled by the “sounds” of you pressing the keys. For example: 1 to go left, 2 to go straight, 3 to go right. Plus it had some special action: **7999# to go in circles, **11111233# to feed it, **1114# to sing, **99111999911# to see the ghost and get scared.

Takara apparently used this same technology in a small racecar at that time.

The technology gadget blogs poked a lot of fun at the Japanese for not having bluetooth on their phones when this pet came out. That’s funny considering how far we still are behind the rest of the world in accepting cell phone technologies.

The photo above is from 3yen.com. They also had photos of a cat and a rabbit

They are much more rounded in appearance than the early pets. We include a photo here of the original Digital Doggie from the early days for comparison. You can see considerable difference in the styles.

Pets include Dragon Lizard, Bunny, Pixie (sort of like Tinker Bell), Scorpion and Tomcat.

More power hungry than the earlier versions, the new units require three LR44 batteries.

Hasbro also has an optional TV game controller called Giga Pets Explorer that allows you play with three more virtual pets on your television, and explore Giga Island. Plus you can plug in one of your Giga Pets to play with it directly on the TV screen. One of the packages indicates they have a Panda, Monkey, and Pooch as the three online games and it looks like they are selling it with a mouse for the handheld pet. Instructions for Giga Pet Explorer are online.

The old Giga Pet Digital Doggie is shown below for comparison with the current pets. Welcome back Giga Pets!

We find these pets extremely interesting. Although somewhat basic, they reopen an old category (Sea Monkeys) and open a new one (direct Internet to virtual pet interaction via flashing lights) that may provide many opportunities for future virtual pet designers.

The brief instructions below come from their online instruction manual. You can also watch a YouTube video from 4Kidz on how to start one up.

Caring For a Test Tube Alien:

You get a clear cylinder with the alien contained inside a white blob they call a cocoon with a tranpsort stick in the top of it. Take the lid (feeding hatch) off the test tube. Remove and discard the transport stick.  With the alien cocoon in it, hold your test tube over the sink and fill it full of water. The cocoon will dissolve, fizz and run over. Keep adding water till the fizzing stops.

When the alien emerges from the cocoon its heart will begin to flash (an led). It is now alive. Drain the test tube and wash it out several times. It is very important to remove all of the hatching residue.

Get a cup of glass and mix some of the prepackaged food that came for your alien. It is called Sloog. Use the package marked “1st Feeding”. Mix it with about 150ml of water, then very slowly pour it into the test tube till it comes about half way up the alien’s antennae and put the lid (feeding hatch) back on.

Too little food (water level too low) and you alien is starving and his heart starts flashing orange, just right and his heart flashed red, too much he starts to drow and his heart flashes green.

Feed you alien Sloog for the next 14 days and he will grow into an adult. Once full grown, he can live on tap water.

He also needs exactly 12 hours of light and 12 hours of darkness. If given too much light he will panic and his heart will race. Too much dark and his heart slows down.

Now for the cool part. Your alien can respond directly to the Internet at www.testtubealiens.com. First you have to register your pet online, then hold them up to the screen in a darkened room and the computer will send a series of flashes to the controller in the pet to interrogate it. The pet will respond with a series of lights you record on the site. The web site will then tell you the aliens age and how many times it has been left too long in the light or dark. You can even place it in suspended animation (coma mode), or “provoke” it.

Wikipedia on How Test Tube Aliens Works:

The white blob (cocoon) you start with contains a polymer called Polyacrylamide. The polymer soaks up water and expands up to 8 times its original size. The “Sloog” you feed you alien is actually slowing their growth. “Sloog” contains a week acid that slows the expansion of the polymer so it occurs over several days instead of almost all at once.

The alien senses the acid through electrodes on the end of its antennae. They also detect water level.

The website interacts with a light detector in the aliens head. The alien then responds to the flashes.

Good Aliens and Bad Aliens

At the moment there are six different aliens. Three are good and three are bad. They don’t really act good or bad. You only determine that by their name. When you buy one it comes with its name on the box.

Kurion – Good

Yagoni – Good

Tatsuni – Good

Namako – Evil

Takon – Evil

Shako – Evil

The storyline is they come from a dying planet called Naratuko. Your test tube simulates that environment until they can find a new planet to colonize.

Their website, Test Tube Aliens, is well done, colorful and interesting.  It also has three online games, one of which resembles Space Invaders (drops good and bad aliens in test tubes and you launch missiles at the ones not on your side).

We find the Test Tube Alien concept pretty interesting, but have a little concern about young children and the “Sloog” as well as with them directly handling the aliens.

In the late 1950’s Sea Monkeys (a kind of brine shrimp) were first sold as a kit called “Instant Life” by Harold von Braunhut. You added some packets to water for a few days and a real, live Sea Monkey colony began to grow and could be raised with minimal care. They were not a virtual pet, but pretty close to it.

Back in 2004,  Mattel licensed Video Encoded Invisible Light (VEIL) from VEIL Interactive and used it in some Batman toys that responded to the TV show. The early toys were a bit expensive, but VEIL technology would also seemingly allow the TV or Internet to directly communicate with a virtual pet.

4Kidz does a nice job of just using some flashes as all they need is a low bandwidth signal to request output from the pet. You then key that output (identify which lights it turns on) into the computer and it reads the output for you.

This same flashing technique could be used with more traditional plush, robotic, or keychain virtual pets and  is in no way limited to the wet test tube pets in this example. Yes, you could just flip some switch on the pet to request the readout, but its much cooler when the web site requests it directly.

We still have some and may use them as prizes in surveys and contests here when we get the blog a little more established.

More info on the magazine is available on a page titled, Virtual Pet Secrets Magazine, over on the Virtual Pet Home Page.

Looking back through it, one thing I am going to do, is write a History of Virtual Pets following up and expanding on the nice history published in Virtual Pet Secrets written by Robert Worne. I have since collected several earlier items and documents, as well as hundreds on the development of virtual pets over the last decade.

Some people have even been killed in real life for their virtual actions. The Telegraph article reports 41 year old Qiu Chengwei of Shanghai stabbed Zhu Caoyuan several times in the chest after he was told Zhu had stolen his “dragon sabre” used in Legend of Mir 3. The sword sells for about 430 British pounds, but required a tremendous amount of energy and time to acquire. Qiu actually reported the theft to “real” police but was told they “could not investigate the loss of virtual property”.

The Telegraph article goes on to report last month (May 2007) German prosecutors launched an investigation into players who “were buying and selling sex with underage avatars.”

Way back in 1997 we noted this trend when we tried to identify Recent Developments and Trends in Keychain Virtual Pets. Our 16th trend was Pets From the “Seedier Side” and noted the Tamahonam Gangster Pet, and how the initial Rikou Rikou Chan if not properly cared for drank beer, smoked cigarettes, and stabbed people. Since then several more seedier pets have appeared including a Charles Manson Tamagotchi.

Most virtual pets and virtual communities start with good intentions, but when traffic gets mainstream and heavy, the seedier side begins to show up in the dark corners and prey on others, just like in real life.

We also welcome any comments or suggestions you may have for our Virtual Pets Blog.

Polson Enterprises