Image of phone pet on a plinth with two people interacting with it. Several people placed their phone on a plinth for others to come up and interact with it, which was really fun to see humans attempt to emulate the pitches to communicate with the pet.
Group of phone pets circling each other. This was not an interaction we expected from the experience but created interesting results with the phones all responding to one another.
Group shot of all the phone pets together during the experience.
"Pet Network" is a p5.js project I worked on with JC Zhang and Harry Zhao. It is an interactive experience made up of cellphones, costumes, and communication.
The experience uses cellphones (and their owners) which run a p5.js program to turn phones into an animated pet. The program outputs pitch and a beeping language and takes microphone input with the goal of finding a pitch to match one of three types. If a phone is placed down and hears a pitch that is a match, it engages in conversation, but otherwise ignores any language it doesn’t understand. Each phone pet has expression movements matching the conversation state: shaky if in motion, still if listening, and talking if in conversation. Phone owners are given a cardboard wearable for their phone to fully transform their phone into a new-and-improved version of itself. The goal of the experience is to get the phones to talk to each other, but humans without phone pets are also able to try to talk to the phones. Using whistling, screeching, humming, and singing, humans can attempt to speak the phone’s language.
Our intent behind “Pet Network” is to create a metaphor for our current methods of communication. By emulating the interactions of a dog park, we wanted to demonstrate how we have become dependent on our phones for so much of our communication with each other. We wanted to investigate the reliance and ownership we have over our phones and let them take the lead in this experience by being the only way users can communicate with each other.
This experience was run twice: once for a class assignment using a room of over 20 people, and a second time for the 2024 Digital Futures Open Show at OCAD University. For the DF Open Show, the project was run as a series of workshops, inviting visitors to make their own phone pet and facilitating connection between strangers.
