Could Table Top Holograms be a Boon to the Virtual Pet Industry

Finally a hologram we can own in our own homes. What surprises me is how cheap the i-Lusio is. It kind of makes me wonder if if the creator wouldn't benefit some from increasing the price just a bit. Still with the cost so low I'm taking advantage of this, and I believe that over time many more people well take advantage of this especially as we see interesting apps develop for it and for other holograms that are sure to follow.

So could this cause a boom in the Virtual Pet industry?

Virtual pets have had an interesting and often strange history. One of the strangest virtual pets I ever owned was Seaman. Though it's actual interaction was limited it was still fun to talk to him for short periods of time. What's more he was the third most successful game for the Dreamcast in Japan.



More recently the 2008 version of Seaman was released on Sony Playstation and sold some 300,000 copies.

Petz (now owned by Ubisoft) has had a longer lived and wider appeal selling over 23,000,000 copies as of 2006 according to Ubisoft's website, so virtual pets are big business, and affordable holograms promise to make the industry even bigger, at least for a little while.

Though as with any industry holographic pets well likely eventually see a short period of rapid expansion, bringing entrepreneurial dreams true before the industry begins to contract to some extent. In order to truly benefit long term from holograms companies will need to think of more unique ways to utilize this technology, and as the internet has shown us it's often difficult to predict at first what those will be.

Regardless of what direction this takes what I like most about this is that it has the potential to spark an increase in the demand for the work of artists, and AI programmers something we could all benefit from.