VR for Crabs

We currently have a track-ball setup for crabs (a Styrofoam ball floating on air) that allows us to measure the movements of a crab in response to visual stimuli presented on four computer monitors surrounding the animal. The setup is used to test how animals (crabs in our case), use visual information to make escape decisions. We track the movements of the ball with wheels, monitoring the animals' responses to stimuli. However, we currently use open-loop stimulation, i.e. without feedback, such that the stimuli are unaltered by the animal's response. What we are missing is a real-time feedback system that uses the crabs' movements to adjust the OpenGL- controlled stimulus projection to the four monitors (i.e. we need to `close the loop').

There are two steps involved:

  1. We need to change the recording of the ball's movements away from friction-wheels to a new optical/imaging-based tracking method, see also this paper. We have the necessary hardware (trackball, camera, and infrared illumination) and OpenCV based software that was implemented a few years ago on a prototype at the University of Queensland (which worked very well).
  2. The output from this software needs to be fed into OpenGL stimulation software (currently based on Psychtoolbox-3 for Matlab). It may well be necessary to move away from Matlab. The virtual environment in which the crabs move is currently very simple (essentially it is a flat plane with little or no structure, above which a predator appears). We would like to extend this simple display to show the animals realistic `movies' of approaching objects (e.g. `predators') and correct those movements depending on the animals' own movements. The approaching objects are usually very simple, such as a sphere, but there is also scope for more complex stimuli.
We envisage this project to involve essentially several elements:
  1. implementation of the optical tracking of the ball movements;
  2. the incorporation of open-loop control of simple stimuli, and
  3. the introduction of more visually realistic displays and stimuli.
You will not be responsible for hardware adjustments that may be required and we have sufficient funds and expertise to work with you if these are needed.

Client

Contact Persons: Dr. Jan Hemmi; A/Prof Julian Partridge
Telephone: 0403660221
Email:[email protected]
Preferred method of contact: email
Location: Zoology building room 1.08 Crawley

IP Exploitation Model

The client wishes to use a Creative Commons CC BY-NC model to deal with IP embodied in the project.