Interactive robot garden

Talking to my friend tonight, he mentioned how one can get a dedicated computer server for pretty cheap. Once you have that, you can implement whatever you want on it, sometimes getting faster speeds than if you hosted it yourself. This got to me thinking of how to develop a way for people to interactively play with my cats over the internet to keep them entertained so they wouldn't bother me so much at night. I mentioned that this would be very much like the interactive robot garden. At which point my friend asked me what I was talking about and I realized that while I had read a number of articles about this garden project, there was very little concrete information I could give about it. Hence, my search for the interactive robot garden.

The google search

First, I searched for: robotic garden
The first few links seemed promising, but actually referred to a project at MIT dealing with a self-caring garden or "autonomous greenhouse". You can check the project out here.

What I was actually looking for turns out to be called the Telegarden. I figured this out from an old link about its exhibition in Austria. Apparently one of the main designers of the project, Ken Goldberg, now a professor at UC Berkeley, but at the start of the project a professor at the University of Southern California, has since written a book about it: The robot in the garden for which there is an MIT press release and an amazon link.

To focus my efforts I then did a search for Telegarden.
This led to a bunch of websites about the garden. From the wikipedia article, I gathered that the project is currently offline, however, it did run from 1995 - 2004 - almost ten years! It gathered a huge community of people dedicated to keeping care of this one garden. It's interesting, because in many ways it feels like a live action video game. Really it's not all that different from things like farmville, or any online game in which you build a world for yourself. The main difference is that you are actually controlling living things and they might actually die.

It also reminds me of the online communities which I've recently been introduced to surrounding animal webcams. Basically, people set up webcams at various locations to monitor animals such as hummingbirds, owls, eagles (a lot of bird ones) and other animals. My current favorite is http://phoebeallens.com/ (a hummingbird webcam), not that they need any more traffic.


I'm fascinated by the communities surrounding these cams. People truly form tight bonds and apparently true friendships miles across the world sometimes. This leads me to wonder what friendship will be like in 20 years. I know even many of my own friends live far enough away for me to only see them a few times a year and sometimes not even that often. Yet, I still consider them my friends, often closer than the ones who live close to me. I was especially fascinated when a tragic event occurred in one of the related hummingbird webcams and in visiting that site I saw the support and the sincere emotions that people expressed in helping out this person that they may only know as a chatroom name - a symbol really.

Well, that took me to a whole different place from where I started. If you're interested in more information, check out the links above or this link to a youtube video of a description of the garden by one of its creators - Ken Goldberg. Also, if you're interested in setting up a cat interactive video based project to keep my cats entertained, let me know! =P