Your plants can now play your video games

The population of the world is currently in an uproar as everyone panics about AI stealing jobs. But nobody seems to be concerned about the possibility of plants stealing video games. Nobody, that is, except a team of researchers from KAIST and the Royal College of Art, who decided to just go ahead and make that happen by building this system, called Plant.play(), that lets a houseplant care for a Tamagotchi-like virtual pet. 

This is interesting, because it eliminates humans as participants — we’re mere observers as the plant plays its little game. The “game” is something similar to a Tamagotchi and the input from the plant dictates how the virtual pet grows and what it does along the way.

Even a Venus flytrap would struggle to actually press a button on a gamepad, so the plant provides input via an array of sensors that the research team set up. Those sensors monitor ambient light, humidity and temperature, wind speed, and the plant’s bioelectrical signals. Most of those are really sensing the environment and not the plant itself, but we’ll let it slide for the sake of the narrative and the headline.

An Arduino Mega 2560 board monitors those sensors and passes the data along to a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B single-board computer, which runs Python scripts to interpret the data and process the game logic. Finally, an Arduino Nano ESP32 shows visualizations of the plant’s “decisions.” The plant and all of that hardware mount onto a frame that is perfect for an avante-garde art gallery.

Does the plant enjoy playing the game? No. The plant doesn’t know what is happening. But if we’re worried about AI taking jobs, we might want to keep an eye on the plants, too.

Image credit: Y. Lee et al.