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Picture in your head what a friendly dog looks like—head up, tail wagging, or rolling over and showing their belly might all come to mind. Now picture an aggressive dog—you might think of snarling, biting, or growling. It might seem like it should be easy to distinguish a friendly dog from a mean one, but we’re actually not that good at judging some of the early signs of dog aggression, as evidenced by the more than 300,000 emergency room visits every year for bites. These traumatic experiences can lead to the development of cynophobia, or the fear of dogs.
But scientists can’t just put people in rooms with aggressive dogs to see how they interpret the animals’ body language or help them overcome a phobia. Researchers in the U.K. created the next best thing: a virtual reality model of aggressive and nonaggressive dog interactions that they’re calling DAVE, short for Dog-Assisted Virtual Environment. They published preliminary findings of users’ experience in their dog VR on Wednesday in the journal PLoS ONE.
James Oxley, a co-author of the study and an animal researcher at the University of Liverpool, told The Daily Beast in an email that current virtual reality dog models often fail to depict true-to-life behaviors. Rather than exhibit behaviors of varying intensity (pulling the ears back before growling, for example), basic models only showed dogs performing tasks like walking, sitting, barking, and jumping.