Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

While visiting her mother in Pennsylvania this month, Lauren Pytel, a 47-year-old high school English teacher who lives in Tudor City, found herself pining for her cats, Tiggles ap Caduet and Munchie Effexorov, and their recently deceased siblings, Claritin and Zoloft.

“They’re named for medications, because cats make you feel better,” she said.

So to assuage her longing, late one night in her mother’s house, she played with cats on the Internet.

Specifically, she played with three kittens that were up for adoption at Bideawee, a shelter on East 38th Street where Ms. Pytel volunteers.

Bideawee had just finished installing three iPetCompanions — remotely operated cat toys that are maneuvered via the shelter’s Web site. A webcam at the shelter shows the cats responding to the toys, which jiggle based on a computer user’s mouse clicks. The remote playtime with felines has proven quite popular. Internet users are allowed up to two minutes to move the toys.

“I’m glad it’s only two minutes, because otherwise I could do it all night,” Ms. Pytel said. “It’s addictive!”

After returning from Pennsylvania, Ms. Pytel was at the Bideawee shelter recently, standing at the glass window of the playroom that houses the iPetCompanion toys. Two gray kittens, Dexter and Mystique, were darting after a pink feather at the end of a wire sweeping across the floor like a windshield wiper in drag. After plotting an attack, they retreated to the litter box. Ms. Pytel cooed at an older cat who seemed unamused by pipe cleaners jostling on the end of a nearby mechanical arm. A camera in the corner, operated by some anonymous user, rotated to take it all in.

The iPetCompanion is the brainchild of Scott Harris, a business developer in Boise, Idaho, whose company, Apriori Control, makes technology that can remotely operate machinery.

Last year, one of Mr. Harris’s engineers announced that he had not gotten any work done the night before — he was too busy playing with his cat, who was mesmerized by a prototype he was working on — a mechanical arm to allow people to remotely inspect items in factories. The cat had other ideas about what the machine should be used for, and was swatting at the device, which seemed to be moving spontaneously.

Mr. Harris’s interest was piqued, and he said to his engineer: ‘Well, if you had fun, what would normal people think?’ ”

Mr. Harris called the Idaho Humane Society and offered to donate a version of what he decided to call the iPetCompanion. Within the first two weeks, the humane society’s Web site traffic went up astronomically.

“The pound hasn’t traditionally been a place that shows innovations in the tech world,” he said. But he saw potential: At parties and meetings, the same eyes that would glaze over when hearing about the possibilities of moving a conveyor belt in Singapore from a Wisconsin cubicle would light up at the mention of long-distance cat teasers.

Mr. Harris has no pets and is not a cat person. “This could not be more opposite from my area of interest,” he said. But he was pleased to learn that kitten adoptions at the Idaho Humane Society went up significantly in the weeks after the toys’ installation. Then he started to hear about the non-felines whose lives were influenced by the remote-controlled cat toys, such as a paraplegic cat lover who said she was homebound and could not have pets in her building. “It made me realize how many people want to interact with cats,’’ Mr. Harris said.

Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

He is now working on other ways that his technology can enhance animal-human technologies: A Tennessee dog day care center has commissioned a Web-operated ball launcher. An aquarium in Idaho is developing a robotic submarine that can be controlled online and that can swim with penguins. He is also working on a device to feed lions at zoos remotely.

More than 200 animal shelters have put in requests to get iPetCompanions for their cats. Bideawee is the only shelter on the East Coast to have the system.

When Nancy Taylor, Bideawee’s president, first learned about the technology, she had Mr. Harris on the phone within minutes. “We want to be on the forefront,” she said.

The price tag, $5,200 for the hardware, software and other pieces, was not in the budget. But a few days later, Ms. Taylor got a call from a woman who wanted to make a special gift in honor of the bat mitzvah of her niece, who volunteers at Bideawee. Ms. Taylor got Mr. Harris back on the phone.

In the days since Bideawee installed the system, the numbers of visitors to the shelter’s site has nearly doubled. Mr. Harris said he has tracked people logging on from around the world, including Australia, Croatia and Sweden.

Ms. Taylor noted that faraway users are particularly useful, since they’re usually up and playing with the kittens at hours when the shelter’s staff and volunteers are not there. But she’s also found users in rather close physical proximity. “Since we started this, productivity in this building has definitely gone down,” she said.

Indeed, the shelter’s receptionist was logged on watching the kittens from a desk a few feet away from the playroom. A chat box on the shelter’s site allows users to discuss the cats’ antics. But every now and then, a user turned the camera so it caught an awkward angle of the people watching the kittens through the playroom window. Ms. Pytel was there, talking to the cats.

“I just read her lips!” someone wrote in the chat box. “She said, ‘So cute!’”