Avatars Let Humans And Rats Interact Through Virtual Reality - Science News - redOrbit
Researchers have successfully ‘beamed’ a human into a virtual reality rat facility, allowing the rat and person to interact with one another on the same scale via digital representations of themselves.
The researchers enabled the rat to interact with a rat-sized robot controlled by a human participant in a different location. At the same time, the human participant (while in a virtual environment) interacts with a human-sized avatar controlled by the movements of the distant rat.
The technology could someday help scientists study animal behavior in an entirely new way, the researchers said.
Once everything was set up, the rat interacted with a rat-sized robot that represented the remotely located human, and the human interacted with a human sized avatar that represented the remotely located rat.
“What is different in our system is that the human is represented in the animal environment through a physical surrogate. In shared virtual environments all participants are in a virtual reality system. In our case only the human is in such a system, whereas the animals are located in their own physical environment without any need for virtual displays,”
Researchers have successfully ‘beamed’ a human into a virtual reality rat facility, allowing the rat and person to interact with one another on the same scale via digital representations of themselves.
The researchers enabled the rat to interact with a rat-sized robot controlled by a human participant in a different location. At the same time, the human participant (while in a virtual environment) interacts with a human-sized avatar controlled by the movements of the distant rat.
The technology could someday help scientists study animal behavior in an entirely new way, the researchers said.
Once everything was set up, the rat interacted with a rat-sized robot that represented the remotely located human, and the human interacted with a human sized avatar that represented the remotely located rat.
“What is different in our system is that the human is represented in the animal environment through a physical surrogate. In shared virtual environments all participants are in a virtual reality system. In our case only the human is in such a system, whereas the animals are located in their own physical environment without any need for virtual displays,”
