Hani, my cat, has lived with me and my wife for about five years. When I was living in an apartment building located in East Harlem in 2003, I had to deal with mice in my house. The building had a chinese restaurant on the first floor, which made many tenants suffer from the ever growing numbers of mice. Adopting Hani immediately solved the problem, making the mice move to my neighbor’s house next door, and me and my wife fell in love with him. Not only did he keep us from mice invasions, he also showed us amazing ‘moves’ that only cats can make. We never had enough of his high jumps.  As he grows up, he has started showing less activity and is sleeping longer, not doing many ‘interesting’ things any more. Now he is five years old and over-weight. Although he can still jump when I tease him with a wired mouse toy, his moves nowadays are not as agile as before, and most importantly, he now easily ‘gives up’ what he’s chasing.
During the daytime we go to our work leaving Hani alone in the house. I wonder what my cat can possibly do or enjoy while I’m not home. If there were a monitoring device that could send me the ‘view’ of how my cat’s doing during the daytime, I would feel less worried.  And if I could ‘interact’ with him, that would be great, even better, what will happen if I could actually ‘play’ with him remotely?
All of these questions got me thinking about building a device that can link me and my cat, and enable us to play through both physical and graphic interfaces. The physical interface would be installed in the house where my cat always stay so the graphic interface will be on either the web or a mobile platform where I can virtually ‘visit’ my cat and invite him to play a simple game.
In my thesis I explore how me and my cat can virtually link and play together remotely at any time (immediacy), anywhere (location).