The paper is about like how humans how dogs can actually use video
calling devices to call their owners.
And I'm looking forward to how this might work.
And actually also very interested in how you would design interaction
in a way or how you would research.
This talk is going to be presented by Ilyena.
So, take it away.
Whenever you're ready.
Thank you so much for having me here.
I'm Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas.
I'm from the University of Glasgow and I'm just here, presenting my
research of forming.
The
Dog internet.
Sort of, how do we prototype a dog to human video call device that I
did with my co-authors from Aalto University
Roosa Piitulainen and Andrés Lucero.
So, my exploration into the sort of dog internet really started, sort
of ten years ago, when I got my dog Zack, I noticed he would watch TV
and I thought it would be really wonderful if he could control the
device himself.
So, I started to build all these computers devices for him, that
allowed him to do things like turn the TV on and off and I sort of
ended up making all these sort of wonderful different Technologies
through my PhD, but the more I got into this area, the more I started
noticing that really
More and more technology is being used in our home for dogs.
Increasingly both for work such as helping them press buttons or
tracking them to playing games.
Such as electronic, food games, or things like this.
And so with this, like huge increase in dog technology, this Market is
expected to be 20 billion by 2025.
It's really been pushed forward by this huge growth in people.
Getting dogs, during covid and during the lockdown.
And there's been
A lot more of these smart devices developed that allow humans to video
call their dog.
So, you can see some examples here on the right.
However, in many of these devices, a dog doesn't really have any
control or Choice over when to use these systems.
Instead, they're often used in a dog's home really without their consent.
And so I sort of went back and I started to think about all these
screen systems, systems I made for dogs and I started to
think if we could make a video call device for a dog, that a dog could
control themselves.
What would they use them for?
And so to explore this, I sort of asked the following sort of two
questions.
You know, what does it look like for dog to control a video device,
and really, how can humans prototype an interactive device with and
for dogs.
Now I asked around prototyping because if we're going to build a
device that should be used by a dog.
So should a dog be involved in this and we should really build around
sort of the dog's requirements.
However, as there is currently, no, sort of clear method on really,
how to do this and dogs feedback.
As we know in very different ways from humans, how they can be
involved and have equality in the process is such a large and open
question.
So when forming Technologies for animals often, you want this sort of
close relationship with the entity that you're working with, it allows
for this sort of a deep, understanding the strong form the relationship.
So When approaching sort of, how does the device look like and how can
we build devices with dogs to answer these two questions
What we started doing was we started developing a device that we
coined, sort of dog phone for my dog
Zack
You can see here and mean to video call on the internet.
So to begin really forming this device, we as no one has really sort
of looked at.
How can a dog control the internet.
Before we sort of came up with these three different stages of
prototyping with dogs and these are sort of to form the shape to look
at the Aesthetics and then to form the interaction Paradigm.
So this process first looked at sort of how dogs interacted with items
in their everyday environment, my dog specifically, we sort of tested
various forms of the Aesthetics to build the device.
For the dog.
And then develop the software and the hardware for the dog phone
prototype from these results.
So, as I mentioned, we build from sort of the everyday interactions
with his objects.
And this was really, to focus around his affordances and usability
around his current items.
So far.
Our dog participants Zack this include items in the environment such
as sticks, and grass, and flowers, and leaves.
And it's also included toys such as stuffed toys, balls and ropes.
And we didn't really tend to use any buttons as he didn't have these
in his ordinary environment.
So drawing from his literature, what we found was that this should
really be tangible objects as an interface.
This is more intuitive for dogs.
And it also fits with their current affordances and recommendations to
use these objects.
So we gave Zach new objects of these most preferred devices.
So this was you see here.
He was chewing a stick.
This was a stuffed toy and also a ball.
He mostly chewed the stick initially, and then after this, it was
very much shortly abandoned with the stuff
Toy and ball, he would groom and lick both of these and he would also
carry the ball around sort of as a mediator.
So both of these items were used really, to mediate his relationship
with his human.
But however, he didn't groom and lick the ball so much.
So we chose with this ball into face shape, after choosing the ball
form.
We then wanted to test the Aesthetics of things.
So we gave the dog first, this very much a hard tennis ball and then a
softer plastic ball that had more.
Malleability. Aesthetics properties
such as texture materiality have recently been noticed as key factors for
animal interfaces.
And so again we gave this to into items to the dog for a week and use
that human to sort of judge the dogs interactions like we did before
to form the shape.
And what we found was the dog tended to fetch the tennis ball.
He associated this strongly with his behavior and after initially
exploring, and chewing the soft
interface, he initially abandoned this.
And so we went back with the soft hollow ball version.
And this was because he had a preference for this in terms of how
frequently he played with this.
The behavior affordances it has, and also its usage as a mediator
between the dog and the human.
With this interface, chosen, the toy then had to be made into an
interactive interface to enable dog phone functionality, you know,
that of the dog being able to call the human and the human also to
video called the dog. As it's currently really unknown how much your
dog can really understand the interaction with computers, many people
believe animals are on this sort of, Continuum of understanding.
We wanted something that really required simplistic behaviors.
And since the dog move the ball.
Ordinarily.
So he would carry it around in his mouth as you see in the photo.
We used this behavior actually for the interaction technique.
So any time he moved the ball.
This would ring the human.
If the human answered they could then decide to hang up and we did this
so that it could Safeguard the dog in case, you know, there was any
negative behaviors from theirs or you know, he displayed anxious
behaviors.
And so this sort of made the
interaction between the dog calling the human.
We also because this is two people in this interaction, both the dog
and the human made it so that the human could call the dog and then
the dog could answer by also moving the ball.
So it was this ball interface that sort of did the mediator between
hanging up and answering.
And so this sort of made the two-way interaction and also facilitated
this two-way dyadic exchanges.
So to enable this, we put hardware inside the ball, that detected, the orientation and
Wirelessly
Broadcasted this to a nearby laptop.
That was kept at the dog's head height in the his main living space.
When movement was detected by our python script, it would trigger an
on-call event to stop the call.
And so in many ways, this ball was sort of an Internet of Things
device and it could just be charged through the opening of putting a
wire inside.
The total cost of the device was approximately 30 pounds GB and the
software is open access in GitHub.
In case, anyone is interested in this side of things, we then
Had to come up with a method to measure, how much a dog would use this
ball to ring the human and also the human to ring the dog.
We use a mixed method approach of combining a diary study along with
sort of important interpretations from The Human Side and also
measurements of the quantitative interactions of how often and for how
long Dog used the ball. The software logged the time and the timing of
the call and human wrote in The Diary of what happened and also took
screenshots of the call.
We began by introducing our dog to the device.
So it was demoed to the dog five times and these demos lasted between
18, 19 and 146 seconds.
And after this, whenever the dog was left alone for long periods of
time, over three months, the dog was given the bottle.
So they could video
Call the human, and the human could call them and they could answer.
Because of the way the software was developed in the Prototype manner,
we ended up
Actually changing the software through three different iterations to
change its sensitivity.
And also how the dog interacted with it.
And we did a total of 16 study days, over three months, period.
In iteration one.
This iteration only lasted two days and that was 18 calls in total.
So nine per day
averaging one minute each call, but half of these calls were made
when the dog was actually asleep with the ball.
And so my dog would often grab the ball and sort of dream with the
ball.
So he would trigger the ball like this.
The human also called the dog, but he didn't really pick up and so
we concluded from this, that the ball was sort of too sensitive and we
needed to, sort of
Make it so it wasn't as sensitive to his dreaming behaviors.
So what we did was we change the sensitivity which formed iteration two
which lasted seven days and while initially the dog did videouse, the
video call device on the first day.
There wasn't any other phone call through this period but what the
human noticed was that the dog ball had moved inside the home,
actually, even though no calls have been triggered.
So the ball was not sensitive enough.
And so we change the device.
Again, to be between iteration 1 and iteration 2.
So by the third and final iteration this lasted seven days with 35
calls were made which averaged of 5 per day.
And, you know, one by the human on day 15, which also wasn't answered
the human coded
All of these calls almost made by accident due to the dog not
responding to the video call from the human perspective and we don't
really know the dogs thoughts or, you know, intentions in this.
The dog also often triggered the ball by leaning or lying, on the ball,
with his shoulder, or his butt.
But due to these continual calls the human often left the video call
on so that the dog could see the environment, flipping the camera
around.
They would show the dog things like the phone camera, the live music,
the restaurants, the public transport people around them.
And in many ways, the human sort of became a mediator between the dog
and the rest of the world.
However, near the end of the study, the human did start to log into the
system.
Only to view the dog, which caused increasing sense of anxiety when
they couldn't see the dog on the camera.
So what do we find from this work?
Well, as this is a sort of a case study in itself.
The findings really have usage across sort of two areas on, sort of
what to computers look like for remote interactions.
And how can humans prototype interactive video call devices with
dogs?
So for dogs interactions with video call devices.
What they we found was that they vary daily for really sort of
unknown reasons, you know, it's impossible to really for us to know if
a dog uses system intentionally or what associations dog phone had for
the dog.
And we suspect that this initial demo phase was really not long enough
or simple enough to really establish a connection for the dog and is
really a key area of future work.
And what I would say is also sort of the hardest step in making these
animal interfaces is really finding an understandable triggering
mechanism for dogs.
And so, we tried to use items that were familiar to dogs, but more
work is really need to understand how we transform these systems from
everyday items into Internet of Things systems.
We also noticed that the approach of classifying, whether they were
interested in the call.
or it was accidental is a valid and often use approach but it's really
unclear in our context.
What does an accidental or even what's an interaction mean for dog using
a computer system.
These terms are very much, HEI ones applied to animals and because our
viewpoint on the world is sort of biased by our human,
Humanness.
I guess you would say about what we see is intent and what we
define as interaction and interactive Behavior.
While the dog had these accidental calls such as leaning on it with
its butt or with his shoulder.
This could also have been purposeful interaction.
We don't know, it could be argued that the dog could have just avoided
the device.
But then this also opens up questions of how can we really Define and
see interaction with animals?
And I would have preferred the perhaps.
There's more terminology needed here Beyond these sort of typical
words.
Aside from this part of the process was also exploring, how the
internet of things can support a dog and a humans relationship while
initially during the first call.
The dog did whine.
So showed a little sign of distress, the dogs human in the later
calls, had more anxiety and additionally, the dog also never answered
the humans call.
And so there is this difference in Behavior between the dog and a human, but
within one system.
So it really highlights that future work really needs to
And sort of manage how we behave with these different stakeholders.
One of the key contributions of the study was also to investigate the
design process with the dogs working with animals is challenging,
because we don't always understand about dogs and computers and the
process of unraveling sort of the requirements of what is a dog, and
what is a need, and what is a goal between, dog, and human become sort
of near impossible when we have this dog human interface.
And so part of this process is really acknowledging that while we aim
to make this sort of dog-centric and dog-focused device.
The human is involved inherently as a builder, a coder or designer.
And an interpreter.
It's also unclear how empowering this system was, you know, because to
be empowered, implies that there is some understanding from the dog of
what's going on.
And so if the dog doesn't understand what's going on, it could be argued
that the dog can't really consent to such a system.
And so we really highlight this as a future key area.
The dogs longest calls were also where the human was showing them
other things than themselves, such as the environment, which opens up
possibilities to dog.
Human environment video calling.
However, what our study really does show, and what I think is the key,
takeaway, is that dogs can really be active users of the systems.
They can really control the video system in their own home.
And while we aimed for this, and we put in things like equality and
empowerment.
So the dog could choose and we try to include a dog in the approach.
It's really still questionable if we can really design for and with
dogs for very different cognitive and biological needs.
As such, I think we approached this in very much a HCI stand
point but it's approach itself really highlights that we need to think
how we Implement Internet of Things devices for animals to give them
this control here.
We're forced to see how would and could a dog use the system which
reshapes our thinking and opens up new possibilities of what a dog
would look like when using an internet system to access the internet.
So in summary, we used a small system in the home for humans to video
call that companion animals, but typically animals have no controls
over these systems and response.
We developed dog phone, an internet of things device.
that facilitates, the dog video-calling the human.
And it a gave insights in how to develop prototype and create
Technologies with animals that they can control.
And through this, we raise critical questions and how to manage your
dogs interactions and we quantify these, and how we can form devices,
and what they mean for dogs.
So I'd like to thank you for listening, and to my co-authors to
supporting my crazy ideas of creating dog Internet devices and also to
my lovely Dog Zack who really inspires me to be a better person and
create these devices together.
You can follow my research on Twitter or contact me via email.
I also have recently started a group with the University of Glasgow
in animal computer interaction and be looking for PhD students.
So if you want to form the future of the dog internet, please get in
touch.
Thank you very much Ilyena, there are no questions in the
audience and online.
I have just a brief question because we're really running short on
time now.
And you mentioned this, this accidental versus interaction like do we
actually know that the dog wanted to interact and I think you also
mentioned this in your paper as well.
If you now reflect on this
how you approached the idea from a research methodology.
And could you just briefly comment on this in retrospective?
Would you change something?
Or would you like argue that this is a good way of prototyping these
devices.
Just what's your comment on this?
I think the way that I prototyped is probably the best way that I can
see currently at the moment of testing these different devices.
It would be interesting.
I think it's so it's so confusing.
You know, I think we should really just give dogs the
Options of choosing and being able to choose these different devices
to see what
What would a dog you have
A sort of tension here, where you don't want to put too much of what
you think is good into this
And you sort of try to in as I sort of gave my dog choices to the
prototyping phase to give him power in it.
And so I would really encourage other people to sort of, you know,
build off my method to really discover what works for their dogs and
then what works for different dogs or different
Animals, and then we can hopefully start forming different ways and
and sort of form the foundation of how to build devices with and for
dogs.
Thank you very much Ilyena for this insights.
Okay, I think this concludes our session.
Thank you very much to all the authors
Again.
Thank you for being here.
Thank you for everyone.
In the audience.
We will resume at 1:30, right?
So 1:30.
We will resume with the keynote over here.
There's lunch in the room.
Next door.
See you, then.