My neighbour is not a hamster.
But the thing is, he likes cycling. The problem is, with lockdown, he can’t really meet up in big groups to pound the road.
My neighbour, then, like cyclists all over the world, has been an avid consumer of new virtual cycling events.
Yesterday, I saw my neighbour pushing hard, in his own virtual world, on his networked bike, in the garage, late at night. A few hours later, sat in the living room, I saw my hamster doing more or less the same thing on his wheel.
It was then that it struck me that my hamster’s life could be vastly improved if he too could be introduced to this virtual world.
Not as a cyclist of course, hamsters can’t cycle. But as a wheel runner.
The market is ripe for exploitation. Hamsters love wheel running, but rarely do they get the opportunity to pit their abilities against other hamsters (one of the problems here of course is that hamsters tend to eat each other).
The first tech provider to respond will surely be sitting on a pile of billions this time next year.
Hamsters all over the world would surely jump at the chance to have the opportunity to participate in virtual hamster races or fun runs.
How would it work?
Each hamster wheel would need to be hooked up to a network and programme.
Every participating hamster would need some kind of virtual reality headset, in which they could see all the other hamster participants.
There would be various virtual worlds, but I think a favourite race route would be through a corn field, back to the burrough.
Managing health and safety risks
Hamsters are simple creatures, they could probably get easily addicted to the technology. To avoid early hamster death caused by over exhaustion, the introduction of the technology should be accompanied with an obligatory compulsory health and safety module. The message should be ‘Use virtual hamster leisure and exercise technology responsibly‘.
Hamsters don’t understand virology and don’t have much insight into the human condition. But if they did no self-respecting hamster would ever say they welcomed the advent of covid and its introduction into the human race. But that said, every cage has a silver lining, and if the introduction of covid would mean hamster leisure was taken to the next level, then at least some good could be said to have come from the pandemic.