You may or may not remember the "Tamagotchi" (released 1996) that everyone used to carry around during recess and lunch at school. These little devices with extremely basic graphic designs and user interface were arguably the begginning of a commercial and affordable device that effectively brought to the consumer a virtual animal, a tamagotchi that they could claim as their own 'pet'.
Then there is also the Nintendo 3DS Nintendogs (released 2005) video-game which allowed players to pet, feed and nurture their pet dogs and cats through the interactive screen.
Virtual pets are more common that one would believe, with MMO games such as World of Warcraft (WoW) incorporating pets into the game on a huge scale. With 100's of pets and creatures to choose from which can be trained, summoned, used as a mount and often becoming the WoW avatars pet companion. The range of pets extends from aggressive creatures to small following non-combat pets. Combat pets can also be used in conjunction with the Pet Battle System (previewed at BlizzCon 2011) in WoW where a person can bring his pet companion to an arena gladiator style battleground to fight another players pet.
With rapid improvements to the current technology behind Virtual Reality, and the ever growing market for interactive video games, we can almost be certain that Virtual Animals will become even bigger than it is today, allowing us to have unrealistic pets such as sharks a possibility - and perhaps for some, it will replace their regular household pets!
Is the future VR? Only time will tell, and 2015 may just be the beginning.
Read more about Project Morpheus (Virtual Reality) by clicking here!
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- Vaughan Rowlands
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