During the design process, Wolf hired an animal behaviorist to gain insights. He learned that cats can recognize activity on a television screen or computer monitor, but most programming designed for humans doesn't titillate them. Cats fixate on an object's color and movement patterns rather than its shape, he said. Diagonals are a big deal for cats. Starts and stops.
Random movement is the key.
Wolf and his programmers paired cat-enticing characters with random movements and added lots of squeaky, chirpy sounds. After testing the game on 100 or so cats, Wolf claims CyberPounce has coaxed cats into uninterrupted play for as long as 10 minutes, a long time for a cat, whose typical playing bouts last for just a minute or two. Some felines don't respond at all. For some cat owners, feline fascination with computers is something to be discouraged. Another cat-related software title, PawSense, is aimed at preventing the kind of feline computer affinity that CyberPounce encourages.