Pet the Dog in VR: Adorable, AI-Powered Pooches Arrive in VRChat, a Free Public Demo of a Upcoming Research Project

The dogs in Happy Hill Dog Park are waiting for you to come play! Available now on #VRChat for both PC and Quest.

Environment and animation design by @jendaviswilson , AI & logic by @CyanLaser . pic.twitter.com/mpJ87FXXx7

— Studio CyFi (@StudioCyfi) May 19, 2021

Click here to visit Happy Hill Dog Park in VRChat, the latest, impressive user-made project on the platform -- not just virtual dogs, but dogs you can interact with in full VR.

That's right: Pet the dog in VR. And feel yourself petting them too.

"Basically the controller vibrates if you pet the dog, and they'll follow you around if you're holding like a stick or a tennis ball," VRCer Ben Rainwolf tells me.

The immersive effect of the dogs' AI, matched to the VR experience seems pretty compelling: "The cute dogs never stop wanting attention and I feel terrible if I don't give it to them," as another player put it. "It's like an adorable trap that you can't leave."

"The dogs gain trust with you over interactions and change their animations and wagging the more you interact," project designer Jen Davis-Wilson of Studio CyFyi tells me. (Her co-founder Cyan Laser created the dog AI.)  "The conditionals of going home, interacting, petting, etc. does get a bit complex with multiplayer networking. But this was a fairly small job."

Studio CyFi, as regular readers may remember, was founded to turn a popular VRChat world into a standalone Oculus Quest game. This dog park, however, was not mainly created for entertainment:

"The goal of this project was academic research," as Jen puts it. "The VRChat community gets to benefit by having the world public and free to visit."

I've reached out to the professor who spearheaded this project for more details, but until then, the virtual pooches of Happy Hill are waiting for you to pet them. Or you can just watch the many virtual humanoid furries of VRChat somewhat bizarrely pet the virtual dogs:

Being a cat, I reluctantly went to that new VRChat world where you can play fetch with a dog. pic.twitter.com/ld7SbAFjYO

— coopertom (@thecoopertom) May 20, 2021

Thanks to Ben and Adeon for the tip!

Update, 5/24: Corrected Jen Davis-Wilson's name and misspelling of Studio CyFi.

Comments

[Persephone Emerald]

Looks the same as VKC dogs in SL, except our avatars look better.

[Pulsar]

VKC (Virtual Kennel Club) dogs were a cute and a clever thing 10-11 years ago. But they are old sculpts that move clumsily today (and with a load of scripts). You control them by writing a command string in chat with several parameters and you sit on them to pet them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhcuK65we7I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uSnOTwqxsg
With the dogs in VRChat, instead, you are moving your actual real life hands and you even have a tactile feedback from the controller. I don't think the experience is so comparable.

Moreover, VKC pets cost between 975 to 3500 L$ and with the rezzed ones at the shop I don't think you can't do much if you don't own them, while this one in VRC is a public park.

I don't want to bash VKC, they are cute for a SL pet (and in SL you can also make animesh pets now), but if you want to compare them, I don't really think they are so comparable, except maybe some idea.