Beaming into the Rat World: Enabling Real-Time Interaction between Rat and Human Each at Their Own Scale

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

Beaming into the rat world: enabling real-time intereaction between rat and human each at their own scale

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

Beaming into the rat world: enabling real-time intereaction between rat and human each at their own scale

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

Screenshot of the virtual environment.

<p>Three of the four posters are visible in the image as well as the two avatars representing both the participant and the rat.</p

Scatter diagram of the proportion of time that the rat was within a radius of 20 cm from the arena centre by the number of rat points over all participants, for both rats.

<p>The number of rat points is the number of collisions between rat and robot that occurred away from the correct poster for the human to obtain a point. The Pearson correlation is significant for each rat separately (Rat A: r = 0.70, P<0.04; Rat B: r = 0.82, P<0.008).</p

The rat arena and robot device.

<p>(a) Two of the pictures on the wall can be seen, and the frame on which a webcam was mounted for tracking purposes. (b) The e-puck robot protected by a purpose-made armour. For tracking purposes, a typical Augmented Reality marker was attached on top of the armour. The plastic platform in front was used to hold the food (strawberry jelly) for the rat. (c) Left hand side: View of the robot and rat for tracking. Right hand side: Result of the threshold used to detect the rat in the image.</p

Waveform of distance between Rat A and the robot device for an arbitrary participant.

<p>Waveform of distance between Rat A and the robot device for an arbitrary participant.</p

Movement of rats and humans (a) Rat A with (b) corresponding participant, (c) Rat B with (d) corresponding participant.

<p>Axes are in metres, and all movements are measured in the rat arena. Hence the human movements are those of the slaved robot.</p

Distance between rat and robot by rat position.

<p>The vertical axis is the distance between the rat and robot corresponding to the position of the rat on the horizontal plane representing the rat arena. (a) Representing all 9 participants for rat A over trial 1 where the participants knew that the avatar represented a rat (b) The same participants for rat A over trial 2 where participants thought that the rat represented a remote human. (c) All 9 participants for rat B over trial 1. (d) The same participants over trial 2 for rat B.</p