Investigation on Enhancement of the Sense of Life in Safari Park Online Tours with Animal Breathing Reproduction System

Interacting with animals in a safari park is an important opportunity to think about animals, and plays a role beyond providing a healing effect through animals. However, safari park online tours do not allow users to experience touching animals, and thus cannot make them feel that the animals are alive (a sense of life). In this study, we developed a system that reproduces the breathing of animals, based on the hypothesis that reproduction of breathing is important to present a sense of animal life to viewers in online tours. A user study was conducted to verify the usefulness of the proposed system, and it was found that the proposed system was able to significantly present a sense of life compared to a comparative method that did not reproduce animal breath.