Feline Fun Park

Read the paper

Image of Toy

Feline Fun Park is a phidget cat toy which interacts with a cat for hours of feline fun. It detects cat interaction and reacts accordingly to keep the cat playing.

To detect a cat, Feline Fun Park uses three input sensors. A weight sensor is used to determine if a cat is inside the toy, A light sensor is used to detect a cat at the entrance of the toy (the cat blocks light to the inside), and a toy mouse is attached to an input slider, reporting as the mouse is played with.

The activity level of the cat determines the outputs of the system. The toy uses a DC motor, a servo motor, and a series of LED lights to entice the cat. The DC motor is attached to a mouse on a string; this is called the flying mouse. The servo motor is attached to the door mouse which peeks out from inside the toy. The LEDs are arranged so that when enabled, they form a set of tracer lights which grab the cat's attention.

Remote Interface

The Feline Fun Park toy is also remote controllable. While working, a cat owner can get a reading of the cat's activity level, and can manually control the toy.

Full quality video: For more details about the project, click here to view the video or read the paper. . This work is to appear at Pervasive 2007:

Young, J., Young, N., Greenberg, S. and Sharlin, E. (2007) Feline Fun Park: A Distributed Tangible Interface for Pets and Owners. (Video plus 4 page paper). Adjunct Proc. Pervasive 2007 - 5th Intl Conf on Pervasive Computing, (May 13-16, Toronto, Canada). Duration 1:13.