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Virtual Pets and People

Techstination feature for Thursday, November 3, 2005

Virtual pets and people. Bloomberg Boot Camp, a report on today's technology. Furby is back from Hasbro featuring what the company calls Emoto-tronics and the ability to speak hundreds of words and understand a variety of commands. Nintendo is using virtual pets called Nintendogs to spur sales of its DS handheld unit. Realistic looking puppies that live inside the machine…..but can interact with other Nintendogs within wireless range. And Mattel has virtual people…Pixel Chix….an on screen friend that lives in a little plastic house. VP Stephanie Cota says…

"The whole idea was really to come up with something that was sort of interactive from a friendship perspective. So that's sort of how Pixel Chix was born. The idea that you have a 2-D girl living in a 3-D world. And the more you sort of play and interact with her, the more things that you can accumulate for her and the house."

Ignore your Pixel Chix character….and she'll pack her suitcase and leave. A reset button lets you start over.

"And what's also really cool about this is…know how girls like to be social, is the idea that if I have one and you have one and we connect them together, then they can go to each other's houses and they can interact. If you have more than two, you can connect them in a line and they can do a fun little dance or they can do sort of a fun little song and there's just a lot of fun interaction built into it."

There are no Pixel Guys to visit…at least not yet. The price, about 30 dollars. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.