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Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them
- johnyzee 3y agoPretty good forward vision, better than I would have expected. Usuallly (non-predatory) birds turn their head to examine things. Maybe a curved screen would be one idea for better parrot UI.
- outworlder 3y agoThey have some binocular vision too. https://parrotjunkie.com/blogs/health/parrot-eyes-anatomy https://parrotjunkie.com/blogs/health/parrot-eyes-anatomy
- jebarker 3y agoI'm glad the parrots are helping researchers understand tablet games.
- drewcoo 3y agogamification =?= psittacinification
- abruzzi 3y agoMy pet Mitred Conure (Leonard) loves to mess with my iPad while I'm reading. On the other had, Leonard >hates< my iPhone. If he's on my shoulder he'll engage in a agressive display waving around and violently biting my shirt. If the phone is close enough to him he will attack the phone. I'm an extremely light phone user so its not like I ignore him when using the phone, but I do expect it is the size makes it competition for his bonding with me.
- jader201 3y agoSounds like we could all be better off having Leonard around!
- amatecha 3y agoI have a family member with a cockatoo (goffin) and it's generally afraid when someone has a phone in their hand. Pretty strange, we haven't figured out exactly what the issue is. Placing the phone down on a table to play some music seems fine, but it seems like once the phone is in someone's hands and moving around, maybe it resembles some kind of predator?? No clue!
- jjtheblunt 3y agoPolarization of the screen might look super psychedelic (especially if moving) to a bird’s more advanced optical system?
- rzimmerman 3y agoWe have a budgie (parakeet, a very small bird) that is obsessed with phones. Honestly anything reflective gets him going, but if you even reach for your pocket to pull your phone out he flies to you. He just flirts with the phone and I haven't seen him try to use it. But if we put a picture of another budgie on the screen he will give it a gentle kiss. He's not as smart as some of these big birds, but there's a lot more depth than I would have ever expected. He has different phrases he uses for different people, and even a set that he exclusively says to videos of himself on an iPhone.
- hbossy 3y agoSome birds can see magnetic fields.
- davidmurphy 3y agoDoes it have FaceID? Could it be the sensors emitting things bothers the birb?
- amatecha 3y agoMade me think of this video where a parrot is watching YouTube videos it likes, changing to different ones, and seeming angry when ads (or the owner lol) interrupt its video-watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZSNhJcKFf4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZSNhJcKFf4
- cracoucax 3y agoActually much more impressive than the research videos, he clearly knows his way around youtube
- INTPenis 3y agoUntil they make a sudden and illogical change to their design.
- ethbr1 3y agoYouTube UX: "We have this one weird cohort that's responding abnormally to all our UI A/B testing..."
- kibwen 3y agoOnly until enough parrot owners find out about this, at which point parrots overtake the human population of Youtube and the metrics start catering to them.
- 082349872349872 3y ago> and the metrics start catering to them "in order to access this functionality, you must first chew through the charging cable"
- ethbr1 3y agoYouTube optimizing for toddlers and parrots makes a lot of sense, now that I think about it... And that's to say nothing of the parrot ad click farms.
- tombert 3y agoIt feels like increasingly, we're finding that humans are not quite as "uniquely intelligent" as we thought. Don't get me wrong, humans are still the smartest animal on earth obviously, but it does seem like we greatly underestimated the intelligence of a lot of others. Birds like parrots and crows in particular continue to impress me when I see them solving increasingly elaborate puzzles, and figuring out how to open windows and the like. Also I just think parrots are cute.
- tocs3 3y ago> humans are still the smartest animal on earth obviously I think this is correct but not obvious. It could be we (I am assuming you are also human :) are just the most ambitious.
- nicklecompte 3y agoOrcas are smart enough to give each other distinct names and seem to understand the concept of verbs/nouns when identifying human words[1]. They could very well be smarter than us, but they'd never dominate the planet technologically: their flippers have no evolutionary path to developing fingers and thumbs. [1] Some people point out that we've never learned orca language but they've learned ours. This is true, but it's also true that orca scientists have never kidnapped human children and intentionally tried to teach them orca language. So it's more of a poetic comparison than a scientific one.
- gregfjohnson 3y agoHeard the following joke a while back, seems pertinent: Gaia making a mental note: "Hmm. The jury is definitely out on whether it's a good idea to combine large fore-brains with opposable thumbs.."
- jbotz 3y agoAlso, all the aquatic animals have one rather serious obstacle to developing an advanced/technological society: no way to make/use fire. Personally I think the only thing that really categorically distinguishes humans from other smart animals is that, the use of fire. Yeah, our language abilities are impressive too, but they may have fully developed after we already started using fire, telling stories around the campfire at night. Fire is what makes it possible for us to make use of more energy than we can physically consume; humans are best defined as the ape that mastered fire.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- krunck 3y ago"Seventeen completed the study; three dropped out after showing slight signs of aggression or a lack of interest during the training period. " Avian rage-quitting? So it's not just humans... I feel better now.
- I_Am_Nous 3y agoRage quitting or issues with rage WHEN quitting? I can imagine a game-addicted bird might get upset if you turn off the tablet or remove them from the gaming area. Similar to a toddler throwing a tantrum if you turn off a movie they are watching.
- dj_mc_merlin 3y agoBirds totally experience rage at inanimate objects like humans. If an objects get in their way or doesn't behave the way they want for long enough, they'll start smacking it. Vicious and intelligent things.
- ethbr1 3y agoTo parrot the above, if you've never seen a goose in Florida get pissed off at a parked car bumper, you haven't lived. They're hilariously persistent in their anger.
- I_Am_Nous 3y agoI don't know what it is about geese but they seem like they are total jerks most of the time. Maybe just because they are one of the more common large wild animals humans can interact with and film and the geese make it clear they want to be left alone.
- miriam_catira 3y agoThere was a corporate office park I encountered once that had a pond, and they had swans in it. The swans entertained themselves by chasing office workers to and from the carpark every morning. ... in my experience, if waterfowl come at you hissing, just look bigger and hiss back - as long as it's smaller than a swan.
- charklet 3y agoReminds me of the Ted Chiang (Arrival) short story "The Great Silence" https://electricliterature.com/the-great-silence-by-ted-chiang/ https://electricliterature.com/the-great-silence-by-ted-chia...
- mutagen 3y agoMy African Grey will engage a bit with the sampler app Keezy. I thought I had video of it on YouTube but I can't find it, maybe I never uploaded it. https://keezy.net/ https://keezy.net/ Thought the sounds would engage him but he's very entertained by the center black button expanding menu on that app. Now I need to make a bird game... He likes both our phones and our tablets, mostly to chew on but he sometimes engages in weird social ways. He'll let me scratch his head while it is resting on the phone but otherwise not, only my wife gets to scratch his head usually. It isn't a usual one-person-bird bonding thing, I can otherwise interact with him normally, train him, and hang out with him but the head scratching is her time unless there's a phone there. He also likes my stylus/Pencil but mostly because there's a nice soft tip to destroy on the end.
- superkuh 3y agoWhat a wonderful site design. Everything, even the video clips, work without javascript execution. This is a site that a parrot itself could load and use. On that topic, I recently saw a video of flocks of parrots that learned to manually spin a water pump windmill by flying up and sitting on the top of it on windless days.
- ideasphere 3y agoI thought the exact opposite from a UX angle. Swiped down and it started scrolljacking and then I read the line about touch screens helping us “to snag Lightning deals on Prime Day” and it was enough for me to just stop reading and close the tab.
- Waterluvian 3y agoI hated it but reader mode fixes all.
- anymouse123456 3y agoThe article looked really interesting, but the scrolljacking made me leave immediately.
- seba_dos1 3y agoThat's a punishment for enabling JavaScript. As GP stated, it's perfectly usable without JS.
- Lalabadie 3y ago> Last year, the team showed a group of parrots how to video call one another, finding that the birds both overwhelmingly enjoyed the activity and could make the calls themselves, when given the option. My heart! There's a separate article dedicated to it: https://news.northeastern.edu/2023/04/21/parrots-talking-video-calls/ https://news.northeastern.edu/2023/04/21/parrots-talking-vid...
- KennyBlanken 3y agoAnd they had preferred friends! It's truly awesome because their owners could help improve their quality of life with just a cheap tablet and the service fee.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoTheir owners could improve their quality of life by simply not keeping them Parrots are too smart and too social to be kept in captivity
- esaym 3y ago[flagged]
- lm28469 3y agoYeah these comments feel so out of touch, kind of a metaphors for what we became with modern tech. We're creating tools and distractions to cope from how unbearable we made our daily lives, and apparently it's progress
- fragmede 3y agoI'm free to log off this website and the rest of the Internet at any time! Harrumph.
- xandrius 3y agoBasically enslaved in a prison but with a tablet.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y agoAre these the same folks that did the parrot videoconferencing thing? These are cool.
- ksenzee 3y agoYep, same group.
- GrumpyNl 3y agoThey are not really playing games, they are picking at dots appearing at the screen, as they would do with seeds and insects. So is it play a tablet game?
- watersb 3y agoAs with humans and touchscreens, there are potential drawbacks — some familiar (“Participants in our study often emphasized the risk of their birds’ overuse, likening their screen time needs to those of children,” the paper reads); others uniquely avian (“When asked what risks tablet applications could pose to parrots, the most common answer was ‘potential damage to the tablet.’”) Concerns about "potential damage to the tablet" are not uniquely avian. The videos seem to show COTS tablets in cases that have been designed for children. . COTS: Commercial, Off-The-Shelf; a product that is commonly available for sale, and is fit for use with little or no modification.
- CobrastanJorji 3y agoGiven the science that parrots are extremely social, this evidence that they enjoy calling each other, and the sheer number of wealthy people that own exactly one parrot, I expect that one of you is surely going to launch a social network for parrots any day now, and it will probably make money.
- dreamcompiler 3y agoGreat. Now my parrot goes on Beakbook and within a month he has a timeshare, a reverse mortgage, and three NFTs. Also his favorite phrases to yell out when company comes over are "The Earth is Flat!", "Vaccines Suck!", and "I'm not flying, I'm traveling."
- kylehotchkiss 3y agoThis seems like the first step towards building applications that birds will use for real tasks in the future. They probably can solve recapcha/hcapcha about as well as I can by now.
- lambdanil 3y agoIt seems it's only a matter of time until we get parrot farms used to bypass captchas.
- nonrandomstring 3y agoDon't leave your parrot unsupervised with gadgets [0]. If they get phone rage... [0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/parrot-versus-phone/index.php https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/parrot-versus-phone/index.ph...
- animal531 3y agoThey need a little touch overlay or something for the screen so they don't need to use their tongues? It's not as if they need multi-touch or other capabilities.
- AndrewOMartin 3y agoThis is going to drive the accessibility crowd wild. Yeah, right now only a small number of your users are Parrots, but that would grow if they were properly catered for.
- pollies 3y ago[dead]