Igor investigated Virtual Reality systems
During their studies at UCF, Life Sciences students must complete the Lab Practice module. This module gives insights on practical aspects of research in natural sciences, students experience lab’s everyday life and get the idea of main approaches to experiment design, while participating in current research or conducting their own. In my case, I wanted this module to be tightly connected to my bachelor thesis, that is why I was very happy to be accepted to complete my lab practice at Prof. Dr. Andrew Straw lab at University of Freiburg.
The lab of Andrew Straw studies neural circuits and behavior. By developing advanced technical systems such as virtual reality arenas, they investigate the mechanistic basis of visual behaviors such as navigation in Drosophila. The main difficulty of such a research is that, in order to provide full experience of virtual environment one must put an animal into some closed geometry (sphere, bowl, cylinder) and project virtual world onto the walls of this geometry. Tricky part here is the distortion of output image according to the geometry of the arena, so that virtual environment looks unwarped on arbitrary surface. In order to achieve such an effect special custom written software tools are used. Currently members of Straw group use FreemoVR graphical engine based on Robotic Operating System and OpenSceneGraph with custom calibration programs and shaders. Even though such a setup successfully does the job, it is not user-friendly, quite complicated and sometimes short of additional functionality.
During my lab practice my main assignment was to investigate modern graphical engines, which are used for games development, as a substitution for current software. In theory Unity engine appeared to be very promising for our purpose, that is way we’ve decided to try implementing it within the framework of my bachelor thesis. As a result, we’ve achieved significant progress and were very close to get the system up and running, but unfortunately had no time. Imagine my surprise when I was invited to continue my work at University of Toulouse within CNRS. Dr. Antoine Wystrach and Dr. Sebastian Schwarz study ant’s navigation and were very interested in building a system similar to Dr. Straw’s VR arena. I was very happy to continue working on Unity implementation and excited to build the whole system from scratch. After two wonderful months in Toulouse, I have solved all the fundamental software problems with Unity engine, we’ve built the VR arena; and the system, even though with some minor cosmetic issues to be solved, is ready to put ants into virtual world.
As a final word, I would like to say, that LAS gives us very broad range of knowledge and skills, which we can use in variety of different fields and research areas. Four years ago I could have never imagined that I would be working with Virtual Reality systems for animals, but I do now, and it’s fantastic.
