Normand, JM;
Sanchez-Vives, MV;
Waechter, C;
Giannopoulos, E;
Grosswindhager, B;
Spanlang, B;
Guger, C;
... Slater, M; + view all
(2012)
Beaming into the rat world: enabling real-time interaction between rat and human each at their own scale.
PLoS One
, 7
(10)
, Article e48331. 10.1371/journal.pone.0048331.
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Abstract
Immersive virtual reality (IVR) typically generates the illusion in participants that they are in the displayed virtual scene where they can experience and interact in events as if they were really happening. Teleoperator (TO) systems place people at a remote physical destination embodied as a robotic device, and where typically participants have the sensation of being at the destination, with the ability to interact with entities there. In this paper, we show how to combine IVR and TO to allow a new class of application. The participant in the IVR is represented in the destination by a physical robot (TO) and simultaneously the remote place and entities within it are represented to the participant in the IVR. Hence, the IVR participant has a normal virtual reality experience, but where his or her actions and behaviour control the remote robot and can therefore have physical consequences. Here, we show how such a system can be deployed to allow a human and a rat to operate together, but the human interacting with the rat on a human scale, and the rat interacting with the human on the rat scale. The human is represented in a rat arena by a small robot that is slaved to the human's movements, whereas the tracked rat is represented to the human in the virtual reality by a humanoid avatar. We describe the system and also a study that was designed to test whether humans can successfully play a game with the rat. The results show that the system functioned well and that the humans were able to interact with the rat to fulfil the tasks of the game. This system opens up the possibility of new applications in the life sciences involving participant observation of and interaction with animals but at human scale.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Beaming into the rat world: enabling real-time interaction between rat and human each at their own scale. |
| Location: | United States |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1371/journal.pone.0048331 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0048331 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2012 Normand et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. This study was funded by the European Commission through the European Union projects PRESENCCIA FP6-027731, IMMERSENCE FP6-027141 BEAMING FP7-248620, MicroNanoTeleHaptics (ERC 247401) and TRAVERSE (ERC 227985). European FP6 and FP7 projects' URL is http://cordis.europa.eu/home_en.html and the European Research Council's is http://erc.europa.eu/. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The authors in the paper who are employed by the company Guger Technologies are Bernhard Grosswindhager and Christoph Guger. The main business of that company is brain-computer interfaces (www.gtec.at). In the work described in this paper, these authors were responsible for implementing the robot controller. Dr Guger, the director of Guger Technologies, has sent the corresponding author an email stating that there is “no conflict of interest with the publication as it was done for research purposes.” There is a small commercial relationship between Guger Technologies and the University of Barcelona (UB). UB licenses to Guger Technologies a system that controls a virtual character that can be moved by the company’s brain-computer interface system. This has nothing to do with the work described in the present paper. Taking into account all of the above this does not alter the authors' adherence to all the PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1383155 |
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