Communications of the ACM
'rovr' Brings Man's Best Friend to Virtual Reality
Machine learning algorithms help RoVR behave based on how you treat him.
Credit: Ridgeline Labs
Making dog ownership, or a reasonable facsimile of it, accessible to those whose can't accommodate a living and breathing dog, is the goal of "RoVR," a virtual reality and augmented reality simulator.
"'RoVR' is a VR/AR dog simulator [for] people who want to have a dog ownership experience but can't," says Henry Zhou, who developed "RoVR" (pronouced "rover") with fellow Tufts computer science alum Jeremy Slavitz. They incorporated Ridgeline Labs in May.
"Caring for a real dog and giving it a good life is a lot of responsibility, but now, with this immersive VR/AR technology, and when you combine that with artificial intelligence and machine learning, we can now create an experience that essentially emulates the dog ownership experience," Zhou says.
Zhou and Slavitz first met in a computer graphics course their junior year, where they discovered their joint interest in virtual reality and its applications. They settled on "RoVR" for their senior design project was because neither of them had ever owned dogs.
From The Tufts Daily
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