Inside VRChat's Happy Hill Dog Park, the Virtual Dog Experience Created by Academics to Study Real Life Well-Being & Social Isolation

Since launching last week, Happy Hill Dog Park in VRChat has been swarming with avatars of all kinds, playing fetch and applying copious force-feedback enabled head pats with the AI-powered pooches. Dr. Kim, the director on the project, told me Monday that it's already attracted over 43,000 visits, and been favorited 7000 times.

And while the bucolic experience might seem like a VR version of Nintendogs, it's at heart a sophisticated project spearheaded by an academic with the modest goal of bringing more happiness to humankind.

Dr. Brenda Freshman, a professor of Health Care Administration at CalState Long Beach, conceived and self-funded the project as a proof of concept, working with Kim (a veteran VR/game developer) and Studio CyFi to deploy it in VRChat.

"What I'm doing now is gathering my academic partners," she tells me during my visit to the dog park. "and we'll be putting a variety of studies together, but I think the first ones will be dealing with well-being and social isolation."

One VRChat user told Kim that he had recently lost his dog in real life, and was now visiting Happy Hill Dog Park in VRChat as a way to heal from that grief. But as she puts it to me in VRChat (watch below) Brenda tells me they're not specifically creating this simulation for people who lost dogs in real life, or are unable to own dogs due to allergies or housing restrictions:

The emotional response is greatly enhanced by the sophisticated AI: Each dog has a Friendliness Scale of 0 to 100 with individual users, and has some rudimentary problem solving ability. When fetching sticks on the other side of the pond, for instance, they will like most real dogs avoid going in the water, and instead search for a path around it.

The team is planning to add elements that enhance the virtual dog/VRChat user relationship, such as a long hike or a scavenger hunt they can go on together. But because this project is all about well-being, any game mechanics will focus on the positive. (The dogs don't bark or bite, and if ignored by a user, will simply lose interest and wander away.).

And while the academic studies haven't yet launched, the team is already struck by the wide variety of emotional engagement their dogs are generating.

"A little kid came up to me and said this is my dog Jimmy," Dr. Freshman tells me, "then an adult was being weird and calling the dog a demon. It's almost like a tabula rasa because any human will come in and map what they need from these dogs."

Comments

[Nelson Cummings]

Amazing job on the dog park in VR chat. I think everybody I take care has to always say goodbye to the dogs when we leave. This is an amazing real thank you for sharing