A Novel Application of the 3D VirCA Environment: Modeling a Standard Ethological Test of Dog-Human Interactions

Abstract

The concept of ‘Future Internet’, ‘Internet of Things’ and ‘3D Internet’ opens a novel way for modeling ethological tests by rebuilding models of human-animal interaction in an augmented environment as an interactive mixture of virtual actors and real human observers. On the one hand these experiments can serve as a proof of concept, as a kind of experimental validation of formal ethological models, but on the other hand they can also serve as examples for the ways a human can communicate with things (i.e., with everyday objects) in a virtual environment (e.g. on the Internet). These kinds of experiments can also support Cognitive Infocommunication related research, the field that investigates how a human can co-evolve with artificially cognitive systems through infocommunications devices. The goal of the paper is to introduce an example for such an ethological test system, a possible way for embedding a prototype ethological model described as a fuzzy automaton in MATLAB to the 3D VirCA collaborative augmented reality environment. Some details of the applied ethological experiment paradigm developed for studying the dog-owner relationship in a standard laboratory procedure, as a demonstrative example for ethological model implementation, will also be discussed briefly in this paper