At CES, we like to show you new things, and we confess that the Petcube monitor isn’t quite new. After running a Kickstarter campaign in 2013, it started shipping late last year for the substantial price of $199. But where else, in the crowded halls and ballrooms of Las Vegas, were we going to have a chance to drive cats to madness with a remote-controlled laser pointer?
The Petcube is like a tiny virtual cat cafe at CES
Complete with lasers
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is a senior tech and policy editor focused on online platforms and free expression. Adi has covered virtual and augmented reality, the history of computing, and more for The Verge since 2011.
The Petcube is a black-and-silver wide-angle camera that will make your animals feel like they’re under the watchful eye of some malign artificial intelligence. Using a mobile app, you can connect to the camera and watch them or capture pictures, but it’s not just a one-way connection. You can also turn on a microphone to talk to them or — more importantly — touch the screen to flash a laser pointer around the room. And if you don’t have pets of your own, you can tune into a shared Petcube channel, wait in a queue, and then control it for a short session.
At its best, the Petcube’s image on an iPhone was clear and fast; I could get the real experience of a cat-human battle of wills, dancing the laser pointer just out of reach until it either bolted or decided to totally ignore me. On the terrible Wi-Fi connection of a CES showroom, though, it was sometimes hard to tell what was going on. I’d move my finger, and the blurry artifacts of a shelter cat would streak across the screen, heading vaguely in the direction of the laser pointer. It didn’t matter. It’s the closest to a cat I’m going to get all month, and I’ll take what I can get.
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