Insect Flight – Virtual Reality

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ambience: Fly Buzz

It sounds like a plot for the next Matrix movie a simulated world so convincing that participants move through it unaware that what they see is only an illusion. I’m Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet. Welcome to virtual reality for flies. Michael Dickinson is a Professor of Bioengineering and Biology at the California Institute of Technology. He describes the instrument he built to study the flying capabilities of a fly.

“So, one of the techniques that we make great use of is to try to fix the fly in one spot, while still enabling it to fly. So, within our laboratory we actually build flight simulators for the flies. We can glue these flies to a little tiny stick, and we can place them in an apparatus that basically fools them into thinking they’re flying. We can measure the aerodynamic forces, we can track the motion of their wings as they flap back and forth, and we can take those signals and we can use them to allow the fly to modulate what it actually sees, in some cases even smells or senses, mechanically. So it will sit there and steer itself through a virtual world. And we can set up a situation very similar to the carrot in front of a donkey. If the fly can steer towards the object but the object never gets any closer, the poor fly will fly until it runs out of energy, towards the object. But the important point is that we perform these manipulations to test specific hypotheses about how visual information is used by the fly in order to control its steering and behavior.”

The results from these tests help researchers understand more about how biological systems are designed. These principles are applicable not only to flies, but to all nervous systems including human. Pulse of the Planet is made possible by the National Science Foundation. I’m Jim Metzner.

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Insect Flight - Virtual Reality

It's harder to fool a fly than you might think! Researchers turn to virtual reality to collect the data they need from these most flexible flyers.
Air Date:09/17/2010
Scientist:
Transcript:

music
ambience: Fly Buzz


It sounds like a plot for the next Matrix movie a simulated world so convincing that participants move through it unaware that what they see is only an illusion. I'm Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet. Welcome to virtual reality for flies. Michael Dickinson is a Professor of Bioengineering and Biology at the California Institute of Technology. He describes the instrument he built to study the flying capabilities of a fly.

"So, one of the techniques that we make great use of is to try to fix the fly in one spot, while still enabling it to fly. So, within our laboratory we actually build flight simulators for the flies. We can glue these flies to a little tiny stick, and we can place them in an apparatus that basically fools them into thinking they're flying. We can measure the aerodynamic forces, we can track the motion of their wings as they flap back and forth, and we can take those signals and we can use them to allow the fly to modulate what it actually sees, in some cases even smells or senses, mechanically. So it will sit there and steer itself through a virtual world. And we can set up a situation very similar to the carrot in front of a donkey. If the fly can steer towards the object but the object never gets any closer, the poor fly will fly until it runs out of energy, towards the object. But the important point is that we perform these manipulations to test specific hypotheses about how visual information is used by the fly in order to control its steering and behavior."

The results from these tests help researchers understand more about how biological systems are designed. These principles are applicable not only to flies, but to all nervous systems including human. Pulse of the Planet is made possible by the National Science Foundation. I'm Jim Metzner.

music