The best dog games might seem simple, but a lot of thought process actually goes into developing them.
Just ask Erick Eidus, who serves as the CEO and founder of PupPod.
The world’s first multispecies gaming platform, PupPod provides dogs with software-driven, positive reinforcement games, while simultaneously providing humans with a powerful tool to be great pet parents when life gets in the way.
As per Erick,
“I had this idea to make better products for our dogs. Like, the idea of giving my pet, Ollie, and everyone else’s dogs just pieces of plastic or plush toys—it just didn’t seem like that was the best we could do for the animals in our life.”
So, with his career and history in building early smartphone devices, it became obvious to Erick that there was going to be a disruption of software in the pet product category.
This eventually led him to the idea of using software to make better items for animals’ health, and eventually, to developing PupPod.
PupPod as the Most Advanced Dog Game of the Future
One of the most interactive dog game platforms ever created, PupPod is a smart tech toy that is not just for pets but also for people. In addition to letting you play with your furry kids anywhere you may be, it also gives your dog the physical activity and mental stimulation they need.
Erick explained,
“The software in the toy…becomes a puzzle where the dog has to figure out when to interact with the toy at the right time. And then the reward for the dog is the treats coming out of the feeder. That’s really just to make the connection between the toy and the feeder.”
Although dogs may consider PupPod a toy from their perspective, Erick and his team really see it as a sophisticated piece of hardware.
It uses operant conditioning to make the animal realize that there is a connection between the toy and the rewards they can get. Once they make that connection, the game can then start getting more interesting for the pet.
Playing With PupPod
To use PupPod, the dog has to interact with the toy within a few seconds of sound play. The time it takes initially starts with two seconds. But, you can, later on, choose to increase the time between the sounds.
Once they get used to the duration and the activity, your pups will eventually learn to build concentration, discriminate between tasks, and control their impulses.
“The best scenario that we recommend is to just let your dog get their meals this way. That way, they’re still getting the same calories that they’re getting when they just scarf their food down out of a bowl. But, at the same time, with PupPod, they’re also getting mental stimulation and physical activity.”
With PupPod aiming to become a platform for cognition research for all kinds of animals, intellectuals and researchers can more easily learn more about the relationship between humans and animals.
“With our platform, we can take all the unnecessary stuff out of the middle. For example, you come up with a hypothesis. If we can code that hypothesis into our system and into our game, then all of our customers can just play a new level. And all of that play is all cognition research. We can give the [anonymized] data back to the research groups to write their papers, their hypothesis, their conclusions. And hopefully, we’ll be able to help research go from, like, two years for research project down to months.”
Learn more about PupPod!
Visit their website at https://puppod.com/.
