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Captivity may have adverse effects on captive great apes, who would spend much more of their time engaged in foraging and other activities in the wild. Enrichment interventions have the potential to alleviate the adverse effects of captivity by introducing novel stimuli. In orangutans, interactive digital enrichment has proven effective at engaging users out of their own free will, in exchange for nothing but the experience. In this article, we report the results of scheduled visual enrichment in the form of “orangulas” - one-hour long videos of footage consisting mainly on open spaces in different environments, with which our pongid participant could engage at free will. We measured the efficacy of our orangulas with both behavioral and endocrine measurements, concluding that scheduled visual enrichment has the potential to improve the welfare of captive orangutans by providing novel stimuli in the context of largely stable environments. Captivity may have adverse effects on captive great apes, who would spend much more of their time engaged in foraging and other activities in the wild. Enrichment interventions have the potential to alleviate the adverse effects of captivity by introducing novel stimuli. In orangutans, interactive digital enrichment has proven effective at engaging users out of their own free will, in exchange for nothing but the experience. In this article, we report the results of scheduled visual enrichment in the form of “orangulas” - one-hour long videos of footage consisting mainly on open spaces in different environments, with which our pongid participant could engage at free will. We measured the efficacy of our orangulas with both behavioral and endocrine measurements, concluding that scheduled visual enrichment has the potential to improve the welfare of captive orangutans by providing novel stimuli in the context of largely stable environments.

Captivity may have adverse effects on captive great apes, as they spend much more of their time engaged in foraging and other activities in the wild. Enrichment interventions have the potential to alleviate the adverse effects of captivity by introducing novel stimuli. In orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus), interactive digital enrichment has proven effective at engaging users out of their own free will, in exchange for nothing but the experience. This article reports the results of scheduled visual enrichment in the form of “orangulas”—one-hour long videos of footage consisting mainly of open spaces in different environments, with which the pongid participant could engage at free will. The efficacy of the orangulas were measured with both behavioural and endocrine measurements, concluding that scheduled visual enrichment has the potential to improve the welfare of captive orangutans by providing novel stimuli in the context of largely stable environments.

This paper introduces the concept of using gaze as a sole modality for fully controlling player characters of fast-paced action computer games. A user experiment is devised to collect gaze and gameplay data from subjects playing a version of the popular Super Mario Bros platform game. The initial analysis shows that there is a rather limited grid around Mario where the efficient player focuses her attention the most while playing the game. The useful grid as we name it, projects the amount of meaningful visual information a designer should use towards creating successful player character controllers with the use of artificial intelligence for a platform game like Super Mario. Information about the eyes' position on the screen and the state of the game are utilized as inputs of an artificial neural network, which is trained to approximate which keyboard action is to be performed at each game step. Results yield a prediction accuracy of over 83% on unseen data samples and show promise towards the development of eye-controlled fast-paced platform games. Derived neural network players are intended to be used as assistive technology tools for the digital entertainment of people with motor disabilities., peer-reviewed