In 2014, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, hosted a Q&A event on the foreign social platform Reddit, inviting netizens to "ask him anything."
At that time, someone asked him if there was anything. He had never thought of it, but it had become a major reason for many people to go online. Tim Berners-Lee said succinctly: "Kittens."
After being certified by the inventor of the World Wide Web, surfing the Internet for cats, or as a more familiar term - raising cats in the cloud, has become a kind of Internet spiritual culture.
Due to various reasons, it is inconvenient for many friends to raise cats, but they can easily obtain a large number of cat movies online. The cat comes, the cat sees, the cat conquers, whether it is a picture, video, or a few meows, it can easily gain millions of clicks.
The advantages of raising a cat in the cloud are obvious, just like owning a fish pond without having to take responsibility. You have a list of cat avatars on your watch list, and the photo album on your phone is full of cat emoticons, but you don’t have to shovel poop for any of them.
Sucking cats online is basically free. If possible, you can go to some offline clubs to earn money and get a better experience. There is nothing more comfortable than this.
Because of this, from online to offline, Internet celebrity cats on major social platforms, countless cat cafes, and catteries are trying their best to meet everyone's needs for cat sucking. But this is still only the most basic operation in human cloud cat raising business.
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Friends who raise cats will more or less install cameras at home to keep an eye on their cats at any time. As for professional cloud cat breeding, you first need professional camera positions and lenses.
In order to serve people who keep cats in the cloud, Explorer.org, one of the world's largest animal live broadcast websites, has set up a special cat video live broadcast category. It combines various media resources on the Internet and sets up cameras around the world, covering many scenes such as catteries, pet hospitals, zoos, and the wild.
In these live cat videos, kittens, big cats, wild big cats, all are available, and there are even live operations on cats, using cameras to record the behavior of cats in a corner of the earth.
The Icelandic TV station Nutiminn even directly launched a TV show "Walking with Cat Dashans", which is a reality show that broadcasts the lives of kittens 24 hours a day. It started broadcasting in February 2017 and lasted for 19 months. The ratings were surprisingly good.
The hosts of this show are all young stray cats from local animal shelters. They live in carefully decorated mini toy mansions for three to four weeks, playing and frolicking until they are successfully adopted, and then a new batch of stray kittens are moved in to perform.
As for China, 24-hour cat watching is also scattered on major live broadcast platforms. At Station B, an anchor has contributed 10 surveillance camera positions at home to show people cats. Nine of the lenses can rotate 360 degrees horizontally and 90 degrees vertically, and support four times optical zoom, serving the cloud cat owners without blind spots.
In order to allow the audience to operate the camera by themselves, the anchor also ingeniously set up a barrage interactive system, which supports barrage switching lenses, adjusting the sequence of lenses, controlling camera rotation and zoom, and even feeding.
The advancement of cameras and live broadcast technology has allowed netizens who used to only browse pictures and videos to be able to raise cats in the cloud in all directions, without blind spots, 24 hours a day, and to interact with them to a certain extent. But the cat still doesn’t know you, and you have to share watching cats with all the viewers in the live broadcast room. The gap between cloud-raised cats and real-raised cats lies largely in the fact that they don’t have a cat of their own.
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Electronic pets are a key attempt in the human cloud cat breeding business to allow you to have an exclusive cat.
It is not a new concept. From Tamagotchi in the last century to Nintendogs, QQ Pets, and Travel Frogs, every electronic pet will bring deep memories to players.
Players who are addicted to electronic pets will inevitably have a process of "pretending to believe". Everyone understands that electronic pets are virtual, but they still don’t want them to be hungry, sick, or lonely. Just like the little prince watching the sunrise and sunset with the rose, protecting it from the wind and catching insects, when the player invests emotions and experiences in the electronic pet, then it becomes real to a certain extent.
In 2017, the concept of blockchain is at its peak. At that time, there was a popular blockchain pet called "Cryptokitties". The pet cats did not need to be fed. They were just pictures and were linked to money. The most expensive "Creation Cat" set a transaction record of 770,000 yuan.
Soon, large and small domestic manufacturers launched their own blockchain pets. These products disappeared as quickly as the topic of blockchain. Their vitality is not as good as another simple cat-raising mobile game, "Cat Backyard".
In the human cloud cat-raising business, "Cat Backyard" is probably one of the most successful products. When the game was first launched in 2014, the total number of developers Hit-Point's team was only 12 people, but they created a group of cute cats, and in the past few years, they have successively launched comics, VR versions, and even live-action movies. In today's popular terms, it can probably be regarded as the Metaverse.
Especially after the launch of "Cat's Backyard VR" in 2018, a meme of VR players "loving the new and hating the old" circulated on the Internet, which seems to mean that electronic pets overwhelm real cats. This is a small step for "Cat Backyard VR", but it is a big step for humans to raise cats in the cloud.
In addition to VR, another major technological driving force that promotes human cloud cat breeding is AI.
In 2020, OpenAI, the most well-known non-profit artificial intelligence research organization, launched the GPT-3 component, the most powerful language model ever. It can create text, act as a translator, and can also be used to write code. Among them, the mobile version ranks among the top three downloads in some countries, such as Brazil. In addition to chatting, some foreign players have taken the initiative to transfer social behaviors in life into the game. During the European Cup, there were players who organized games to watch the game in the game.
"My Oasis" will soon launch a new version in August, adding a pet system and a world creation function, allowing players to use the editor to create their own homes, similar to "The Sims", where they can change furniture, wallpaper, etc. at home. In the new version, players can build a cat cafe by themselves and let friends bring cats in to play.
Since "My Oasis" is positioned as a social platform, there are currently no plans to add any paid items, including pets. In the future, if more cat litter boxes, cat sticks and other poop shoveling props are added, they will be distributed through achievements and other methods. If you are interested in the latest achievements of human cloud cat breeding, or simply want to adopt an electronic pet, and hope it is the most talkative one based on the current technological level, this AI kitten may be a good choice.