Petting Zoo is an interactive installion that replaces animals with robotic pets. Image: Minimaforms The pets react to human touch and interaction. Image: Minimaforms A Kinect camera senses the visitors' location and movement and their activity is mapped. Image: Minimaforms Each pet constructs a framework pattern of behaviors that act as memory and enable each pet to learn to evolve over time. Image: Minimaforms They're able to develop a series of behaviors that fits the context of each situation. Image: Minimaforms The installation is an investigation into how architecture can enable new relationships and alter engagement between people, information and space. Image: Minimaforms

It used to be when you visited a petting zoo, the coolest thing you could touch was a goat. And while that was fine when you were five, it turns out that goats are actually pretty creepy and not that fun to pet. Thank god then, that there’s a new type of petting zoo that does away with living animals altogether. Experimental architecture and design studio Minimaforms has created a bizarre petting zoo where rabbits, ponies and pigs, have been replaced with robotic “pets.”

>The longer the pet is alive, the more it learns.

Like actual living organisms, Minimaform’s Slinky-like creations react to human touch and interaction. Each animal exhibits a range of emotions that swing from playful to angry to bored to confused based on visitors’ actions. Brush up against one of the robots and it might curl up flirtatiously. Ignore the pet, and it might perform for your attention or give you the cold shoulder.

“In a scenario that the pets have participants in the space that are passive and are standing watching them, they will "perform" to stimulate engagement between the potential participants,” explains Minimaforms co-founder Theo Spyropoulos, who along with his brother Stephen programmed the pets' behaviors. “If this performance is unsuccessful to foster curiosity, it may continue to perform or get bored and ignore them.”

Each pet uses a Kinect camera to observe participants whose gestures and positions are processed through blob detection and mapped over time. “This triggers the pet activity enabling the behavioral features that we have developed to engage communication and response,” he explains. “It does not use any other sensing devices but mines the information and ability to understand gesture, activity, and population of participants to serve as the real-time information that it mines.”

The longer the pet is alive, the more it learns. Spyropoulos says the pets possess a rudimentary version of machine learning which acts as the their memory, allowing them to develop a series of behaviors that fits the context of each situation.

On its own, Petting Zoo is a fascinating interactive exhibition, but it goes deeper than just creating something neat to look at. Spyropoulos says it’s really an investigation into how architecture can enable new relationships and alter engagement between people, information and space.

In other words, how we can use technology to build emotions and performative features into our built environment. “We feel it is important to explore how space can operate as interface within our design environment,” he says. “We are exploring, rethinking the potential of architecture as an embedded spatial environment of the everyday.”