Video games for dogs aim to help aging canine brains | Hacker News Reader

Video games for dogs aim to help aging canine brains

axios.com

64 pointscpeterso54 comments

Honestly, just talk to your dog. I will talk to her like she’s a real person but with a slightly more exaggerated tone and she loves it. I.e. “Did you sleep all day again!?”

Exactly this. Talk to them. At length. Take them out for walks and runs. Let them explore and sniff and meet other dogs. Let them chase a ball or a stick. Hide a treat and let them find it. Cuddle them. Oh, but wait. That requires work and involvement. Better to stick 'em in front of a screen, just like we do with kids.

You can do both, HN of all places to find luddites is weird. If there's something my doggo can do while I'm working that just seems great.

I think their response is motivated by virtue signaling instead of being adverse to technology, but yeah I agree you can do both.

> HN of all places to find luddites is weird.

HN isn't an enthusiasts' site, though it sometimes feels like one. That latest framework rarely gets much love when the incumbent has all the features (and fewer bugs).

Honestly, just get a cat.

All of my dogs pretty much ignored screens, with studies suggesting reasons from the refresh rate to lacking smell and tactile feedback - wonder if playing video games can be taught

As a scent hound owner, if something doesn't smell, it might as well not exist. He also ignores mirrors. They live in a very different sensory world. I wish I could experience his and he could experience ours.

Also a scent hound owner here, can confirm. For her, the sniffer is The Source of Truth™. When I enter the house, she comes up and gives me a thorough sniffdown, as if she weren't confident in me being me until she confirmed that I smell like me.

Anecdote time, when i lived with my parents on their farm we would regularly have sniffer dogs come to our property because they got lost on a scent trail in the forest with a hunter, this happened every year with different hunters/dogs, i always wondered how they can find something in the forest but not find back to their owner :)

It's not that they can't find their way back. It's just that whatever they're sniffing and tracking is more interesting!

One of mine will see a dog on the tv and start growling. My other two only respond to barking on the tv, then look around like they are being punked.

Not mine. My rotty left a massive smudge on a 32 inch screen when a lion crossed and she decided to attack or at least investigate. Now I have a german shepherd and a much bigger screen. She's not super into TV, but I'll catch her high focused and attentive to the screen from time to time. Just depends whats on.

Dogs are all different. That same rotty would chase flashlight. And that same flashlight is invisible to my german shepherd. Any toy or activity is going to vary dog to dog.

My Rottweiler adores watching TV, same issue though - I’ve got to keep an eye on her or else she’ll go ahead and give the tv a pretty big (and potentially destructive) boop with her nose to check if the animal she just saw on the screen is real.

my dog will ignore screens, usually, but if you pause it with a person on the screen, she will EVENTUALLY (like 30 minutes later) notice there is a person in the living room and start growling. or maybe she just doesn't appreciate Jupiter Ascending

How timely. My doggo Pip seemed to engage with a game called Valiant Hearts. In it, a dog has to fight a brutal war. I captured the moment: https://imgur.com/a/sm5gUYc

So, for everyone whose dog is ignoring the screen, maybe the solution is to play them a show starring dogs. :)

Also try to find them a way to lay down that they can stare at the screen for an extended period of time. If your TV is even slightly up in the air, their bodies aren’t very suited to laying down while watching the screen. (Dogs don’t lay on their backs like we do.)

Another company with a shipping product in this space; https://go-dogo.com/

Yes, we’ve built the worlds first fully touch-free mental-stimulation toy Like a Wii with treats. Find the moves that make the treats rain! Ships only to the United States and Denmark (our home country)

Every time something like this comes up there is an influx of comments making fun of dog owners for loving their dogs too much. Just let other people love what they want.

>Just let other people love what they want.

But what if that love causes them psychological and financial damage (like pulling out tons of stops to support an aging dog)? In that case, you're endorsing irrational behavior, and you're doing those people a disfavor.

Would you say caring for a child or parent is irrational behavior?

My cat is a part of my family. I would do anything for him.

Man, you need to go find the wizard of oz because I dont think you have a heart, tin man.

Love can cause psychological and financial damage. That’s part of the deal.

What determines whether a dog can understand screens? Mine don’t, yet i’ve seen videos of dogs watching tv shows

I guess it depends on what they find interesting. I know dogs of the same breed that has completely different attitudes towards TV. Some don't care at all, but others will watch if there's a bird on the screen.

Minor annoyance: Many TV shows feel the need to add dog barks in the background for random reasons. That's not necessary and can trigger family dogs (some don't care, but will join the others when they bark)

Million dollar idea for Netflix: Could you please give an option to filter out dog barks? I would even pay for that.

> He notes that Joipaw’s games are not meant to be a replacement for spending time with your dog.

I read this as ‘child’.

Dogs have replaced children for most people.

Sorry, this is wrong in multiple ways. People that own dogs are a small percentage of any countries population. About 20% in USA, far lower than the number of people that have children. Additionally, cat ownership is higher quite a few countries, certainly not all. https://www.petsecure.com.au/pet-care/a-guide-to-worldwide-p...

False. There are more dogs than children under 18 in the United States.

Maybe in your tiny microsystem, but not "most people" in any meaningful universal measure. The stats for the US are about even: 38% of housholds with dogs vs. 40% with children under 18. Once you account for all those households with both kids and supplemented with pets I doubt it's even close.

Giving treats for playing video games... Works great for people; what could go wrong with a dog?

What about talking & playing with your dog, or taking it for a walk? This smells like a recently minted MBA pitching "People love their pets! They treat their dogs like children, and everyone wants the best for their kids!"

Here's a business idea. Create a robotic dog as a dog companion. Large language models that can fool adult human can certainly converse with dogs. Couple it with Boston Dynamic's dog robot and you have workable version.

> run on a custom saliva-resistant touch-screen console

So a standard resistive touch screen?

should've called it a lick screen

Side note: when I was basically doing browser emulation in Google's indexing pipeline 20 years ago, I ripped through a billion of the 4 billion top web pages and counted HTML tag attributes found in the wild, in order to prioritize emulation efforts.

"onlick" was a surprisingly common misspelling of "onclick". There must have been quite a few web developers wondering why their click handlers weren't working, but I imagined them furiously licking their screens, attempting to debug what was wrong with their taste-o-vision enabled webpages.

On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. Well, except for the furries; I recognise at least one username here from my IRC days.

I had a similar thing where I kept spelling things "folating" pallets instead of "floating". I kinda miss the days where floating pallets were a standard UI item.

even worse if you have a tight font kerning that blends the c and the l..

Not sure about their product but resistive touch screens can require quite a bit of pressure which is a separate step of training the pet to overcome this.

Another product in that space was CleverPet, I backed that on Kickstarter and our dog enjoyed it quite a lot but it also required some pressure

https://youtu.be/tU5tMOIJfpo

On some level this is in the same category as getting a psychologist for your chickens.

> saliva-resistant touch-screen console

Had me laughing out loud in public like a fucking jackass

What's next after "first world problems"?

Time for smellovision.

Meanwhile some people still don't have access to clean drinking water.

Presumably, you’re donating 100% of your own efforts to remedy that? (With the occasional and understandable break to comment on HN, of course)

Assuming you’re on your way to deliver them much-needed clean drinking water while typing this comment?

You make a fairer point than people realize. In 2023 we need less 'dog video game' disruption and more impact. Trying to commodify increasingly stupid things is a direct product of the startup culture this site (and Twitter + the community at-large) promotes.

This will look more embarassing than a professional history with fushigi balls if you put it on your resume. It doesn't matter if you're Joipaw-scale or DogTV.

Agreed. What we really need is a new payroll system with an API that uses GraphQL instead of Rest.

But seriously: niche products always look uninteresting and stupid to someone, and niche products trace all the way to folk crafts. cottage industries, and open air markets. Making video games for dogs is neither embarrassing nor a “product of startup culture”. It’s just something somebody thought was cool and put some time and money into. It’s great.

There's no "we". Different people need different things.

everyone else is replying with 'Yeah, and whatabou-you?!?' , which I think is non-constructive.

i'd just like to remind everyone that when you see something that represents an effort that you feel is trivial , it doesn't represent an opportunity to add effort elsewhere.

A thousand dog exercise machines won't fix world thirst. The people that work on dog exercise machines aren't going to suddenly divest all their effort from exercising dogs and throw themselves into tackling world-thirst should their company dissolve tomorrow.

'World effort' isn't one big commoditizable sum.

Are we to have no fun at all because people suffer elsewhere?

They've had the same time we've had to build a system to deliver clean water to themselves - if they haven't it's their fault and they deserve what they have (or don't have).

Ah yes. The « they should have work harder at school » argument.

I struggle with this one. People are not idiot, if water is scarce, it’s usually due to external factors.

Having grow up in a major colonial power, I sure benefits for the extraction of resources that happened since the late 17’s.

On the receiving end, societies being reduce to mere shadows of themselves by force does not exactly help.

Moreover, Some existing irrigation systems have been abandon during colonial times for lack of workers. ( workers being either diverted to slavery or other more lucrative endeavors for the colonial power )

Finally, modern pollution is a thing.

Are the resident of Ohio responsible for their newly polluted water?

Or the one of Jacksonville, Ms, they should have voted differently to avoid flooding of their system?

Same for Flint, Mi. They had a working infrastructure. Distributing water just fine. It was broken for years. Is it their fault?

I struggle to see the benefit of finger pointing here, as opposed to human empathy and « yep, that sucks »

Finally, and the examples above were hitting at that : drinking water is not a problem in country lacking propers infrastructure anymore.

The list of US cities having issues is growing; and the causes are diverse. From negligence to poor location ( haha; Las Vegas )

My point : saying « they should have a infrastructure by now » is silly.

OP's comment history suggests that they are not engaging conversation in good faith. Best not to feed the troll.

True. But if you know a bit about programming and a lot about dogs, that won't necessarily translate into being able to help with infrastructure.

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