The team altered the code of Grand Theft Auto, switching the main human character for one of eight kinds of dog.
They generated 118 videos of the dogs sitting, walking, barking and running in a range of different weather and lighting conditions.
Their so-called ‘DigiDogs’ were made up of 27,900 frames in total.
They will now fine-tune the intelligence system to make sure it can predict a 3D pose just as well from real dog pictures.
The team says the process could be used by conservationists to spot injured wildlife in the future.
