Virtual Pet Taken To The Next Level

Remember Tamagotchi, the first ever kind of digital pet known to mankind? The pet that everyone wanted, kept in their school bags or left in their lockers? It was also the pet that people worried about in their absence and wondered about when out on dates. With the Tamagotchi behind us, what kind of virtual pets do we have today….no, correction, what kind of virtual pets do our children and their grandchildren have today?

We are talking about virtual pets that are so real that they might as well be sitting right there on your living room floor with you, toiling with your table lamp and threatening to break the springs to your sofa. If you have never played a Tamagotchi before in your life, here’s a short explanation. There is this little pocket-sized contraption that you take around with you (your pet) that you can feed, play games with, clean-up, check for age and their happiness (and other stats like hunger, need to play, etc), connect with friends and you can even marry off your Tamagotchi with your friends’ Tamagotchi.

But that’s not what I am talking about today.

The modern digital pet has gone beyond that, you see. Now, with a little wiggle of your finger, you are literally petting or combing your pet’s hair and it actually squeals with pleasure! It’s the new Sony Playstation3 game called The EyePet. To an adult, it may not qualify as the ‘cutest thing in the world’ but it is, admittedly annoyingly beguiling. The game comes with a camera that captures you and your surrounding and it is displayed on screen together with your pet. What is interesting to us is the transformation cards that comes along with the game. It’s called tools.

The card is a QR Code and when you put the QR Code in front of the camera, it is transformed into a comb, feeding bottle, a ball, shampoo or a blow-dryer. The QR Code card can be transformed into a toy for your pet to play with too – it is simply amazing what technology combined with QR Code can do these days!

Playstation is basically banking on the QR Code technology the same way consumers are using their cell phone cameras – the cell phone camera in capturing a single image vs. the camera of the game capturing frames of the QR Code and recognizing it and then decoding it as an object.

It is exciting to see what else the world can come up with in the form of entertainment using QR Code.