In this installation you play the role of a shepherd who must herd a bunch of sheep with attitude through a course using Duncan H. Terrier (aka Duncan of Innisfree) as your sheepdog. Duncan, and the sheep are fully autonomous, although Duncan responds to voice commands such as "Bye", "Away", "Steady", "Down" and so forth. In fact, you can train Duncan to respond to any set of utterances in any accent because he is looking at the acoustic pattern, and not doing speech recognition per-ce. In any event, both the sheep and Duncan have a mind of their own. For example, if the sheep get frightened they may bolt or charge.


Duncan was a Highland Terrier developed to explore a variety of issues ranging from spatial learning and object permanence to temporal representations for Synthetic Characters. He was also the first character developed using our C4 architecture. Duncan was featured in an interactive installation sheep|dog: trial by eire.

Object Persistence Video - 34 MB Quicktime
Spatial Common Sense Video - 2 MB Quicktime
sheep:dog Video - 14 MB Quicktime
Goatzilla Video - 14 MB Quicktime

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