Copyright Ian Pearson, BT Futurologist

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The future of hamsters

Ian Pearson, Jan 2005

My daughter Rachel has a pet hamster, called Marmalade. It has quite a good life. It has a constant supply of fresh water and high quality food on its doorstep, and it can run around in a fairly interesting cage, or run on a wheel till it gets tired. Rachel gives it lots of attention, so it is pretty happy as hamsters go. It has never seen its natural habitat so probably doesn’t feel deprived of freedom. I have no idea whether it ever misses seeing other hamsters, but it seems to cope OK.

A few years ago, someone invented a huge hamster ball for people, which would allow them to wander around a virtual environment in any direction without ever coming to the edge. The ball was about 2m diameter and suspended on an air bearing. The virtual environment was projected onto the ball surface, giving the illusion of full immersion. Now I know that hamsters don’t actually have very good eyesight, but supposing we were to make a hamster ball that we projected a natural environment onto. The hamster could live out its life believing it was in the wild. We could provide it with friends and interesting terrain. We could simulate predators too, except that they wouldn’t actually be dangerous to it. The hamster might have a more enjoyable life. And because it has poor eyesight, the video projection wouldn’t have to be verfy high quality, so it could be cheap.

But we are now seeing the development of computer games that use smells, with tiny amounts of liquid being vapourised at appropriate moments to convey the illusion of a rubbish tip, perfume, whatever. So perhaps we could do a smell version of this virtual reality for the hamster instead of a visual one, or as well. And I’m sure we could develop a smart feeding device that only opens and delivers food when the hamster is in the right virtual location, so it would be able to forage for its dinner pseudo-naturally too.

I don’t expect the market for such a gadget would be very large, but with the falling costs of technology, it won’t be long before such toys could be made economically enough to be attractive to caring owners. Our pets would still live in captivity, but they would be able to live out a much more natural lifestyle.