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Austin Stewart, used with permission.
Imagine if you will, that in The Matrix, the robots weren’t keeping people alive to generate power, but rather, for food (they’re robots that need to eat, okay?). Ready for the Rod Serling-esque twist? What if they weren’t people and robots, but rather chickens living in the matrix? Like all good sci-fi, this is the world you may already be living in.
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Austin Stewart is an assistant professor at the computer engineering/agricultural hub Iowa State University, who is working on an Oculus Rift virtual free-range reality for chickens called “Second Livestock.”
A screenshot from the Oculus Rift. Image: Austin Stewart, used with permission.
Through the magic of wearing little headsets displaying a bucolic chicken paradise, chickens could peck and cluck to their little hearts’ content—from virtual sun-up to virtual sundown—never knowing that they’re actually packed into a skyscraper, towering above a restaurant that is going to turn them into Virtual Free Range™ nuggets.
Image of the Waste Zero Facilities in an urban setting. Image: Austin Stewart, used with permission.
Theoretically it’s the best of all worlds—”Virtual Free Range™ combines the physical and psychological benefits of free range with the safety and security of conventional agriculture. Chickens are free to roam, socialize and ‘eat’ virtual food, which appear in the virtual world where their real food trays are located,” the website says:
The enclosures are built to provide a comfortable and healthy home. Omni-directional treadmills provide livestock with the freedom to move freely in the virtual world. Each enclosure has independently filtered air to keep communicable diseases and parasites from spreading throughout the facility. The birds are fed a diverse, organic free range diet.
It could be argued that they are better off in our facilities than they would be in the real world.
Yes, Stewart knows what this sounds like.
“I get asked all the time, ‘Are you serious?’” he told Modern Farmer. “Then I show them the set-up and tell them to try it for themselves.”
Check out that matador-like dodge there. He even has this picture of someone trying it.
So I called him—keeping me safe from getting distracted by pretending to be a chicken—and in my sternest “gotcha journalism” voice, asked him, “But really, are you serious?”
“Let me start by saying that this technology is totally plausible,” he told me in reply. “I think with what we currently have, we could do this. That being said…” he then slyly laughed, “really the point of this project is to create something that is believable enough that it sparks a strong debate about both animal husbandry and also human husbandry.”
The conversation then took a Serling-esque twist. “We live in little boxes; we work in little boxes, just like the chickens that we have on our factory farms. And so in a sense we’re not really free-range either.”
At this point it shouldn’t be too surprising to find that Stewart is a professor in the Integrated Studio Arts program at Iowa State, albeit also teaching in the newly established “Masters of Design, Sustainable Environments” program which is taking in its first class this fall. So our conversation veered away from how you get chicken droppings off a yoga ball—although he waxed that maybe high-pressure air could do the trick, especially if the ball was made of, say, Teflon.
“I could bullshit a lot of stuff about this project at this point,” Stewart said. “I’ve gotten questions about how many enclosures per layer we’d do, and power—and usually I just come up with a number off the top of my head.”
Still Stewart knows some stuff about chickens: They roost in trees, they like a mix of open space and coverage, and so on.
“I’ve done a fair amount of research on chicken vision,” he said. “Where we have three color cones in our eyes—red, green, and blue—they have a fourth color cone in the near ultraviolet range. In order to really give them the world they’re expecting to see we’d need to develop a camera sensor in order to know what that world looks like, and LCD screens that have four colors per pixel instead of the normal three.”
Stewart’s plan is to tour the project around and show it at agricultural tech shows and elsewhere beyond the art gallery or academia. Just as one person I felt pretty conflicted about this idea—more depressed than I thought I’d be—so it’d be interesting to find out how broad swaths of the population reacts.
“I do think there is legitimate science that could be done on would animals accept a virtual reality world and what that would take, and is that even a good idea? And is it a good idea that we do it to ourselves and choosing to this?” Stewart said. “But it seems like people are having authentic experiences online and in virtual communities so maybe animals could have those experiences too.”
