The Future Of Livestock Is VR-Bred Free-Range Chickens?

The Future Of Livestock Is VR-Bred Free-Range Chickens?

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Ever wondered what would happen if you strapped a VR headset on to a chicken's head? Well, Iowa State University assistant professor Austin Stewart did. Last month he gave a talk about exactly this subject, positing that if you take a chicken living in a small space and give it a chicken-sized Oculus headset, it suddenly isn't in a confined space anymore – it's free-range.

Stewart's project is called Second Livestock, and while it's as much of a weird social experiment as it is a joke, he's playing its presentation very straight in order to get people to think about how people think about the applications for VR and broader implications of technology.

"A networked grid of cubicles with Internet access is not far removed from the enclosures we build for our chickens. However, our chickens likely get more exercise while on the job," the marketing material for Second Livestock states, drawing a blatant parallel to human interaction (and obsessive technological addiction.

“I think we need to carefully evaluate whether this direction is a good direction to go for our species,” Stewart said in an interview with Fast Company. “It’s not so much that [virtual reality] is lacking humanity as it’s creating these really safe environments where we’re not actually exposed to anything harmful, which I don’t think would actually be really good for us.”

Could a Second Livestock-esque agenda be the ultimate social interaction initiative for the newly Facebook-acquired Oculus? Doubtful. But it sure gets you thinking about our approach to this kind of thing. We could all be chickens. Buh-gawk!

[Via Fast Company

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