Birds of a Feather Video-Flock Together
Video-Calling System for Pet Parrots
Rébecca Kleinberger, Jennifer Cunha, Mega Vemuri, and Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas
🏅 Award: Best Paper Honorable Award
⭐ Honors: Featured in over 1000 media outlets
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About
Millions of parrots are kept as pets in the US, often lacking appropriate stimuli to meet their high social, cognitive, and emotional needs. We developed an approach to allow parrots to engage in video-calling other parrots and ran a three-month study with 18 pet birds to evaluate the potential value and usability of a parrot-parrot video-calling system. With 147 bird-triggered calls, our results show that 1) every bird used the system, 2) most birds exhibited high motivation and intentionality, and 3) all caretakers reported perceived benefits, some arguably life-transformative, such as learning to forage or even to fly by watching others.
Publication
Birds of a Feather Video-Flock Together: Design and Evaluation of an Agency-Based Parrot-to-Parrot Video-Calling System for Interspecies Ethical Enrichment. Kleinberger, Rebecca, Jennifer Cunha, Megha M Vemuri, Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas. Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2023, PDF, DOI
🏅 Award: Honorable Mention Award
🏅 Honors: Featured in over 1000 media outlets including The New York Times, The The Washington Post, The BBC, etc.
