LOOK to your right and a giant red ant scares the wits out of you. Look to
your left and grotesque car-sized bugs block your path. It sounds like a scene
from Honey I Shrunk the Kids, but it鈥檚 just a day in the life of Tom
Malzbender鈥檚 creepy new invention which lets you roam around an environment
stuffed with gigantic living insects.
As a child, Malzbender spent hours hunched over a microscope studying and
classifying tiny creatures, such as protozoa and insects. 鈥淚 was always
enthralled by the diversity and the strangeness of that world,鈥� says Malzbender,
who is now a computer scientist at Hewlett-Packard鈥檚 research lab in Palo Alto,
California.
To bring people face-to-face with these creatures, Malzbender and his
colleagues turned to 鈥渢elepresence鈥濃�攖he experience of being present at a
location remote from one鈥檚 actual surroundings. They wanted to transport people
into a microscopic environment.
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Their bug-ridden world is a 鈥渇ield鈥� of green moss, just 15 by 10 centimetres,
inside a clear Plexiglas case. Insects such as velvet ants, milkweed bugs and
ladybirds scurry around in the moss, which is placed on the platform of a
converted computer-controlled machine for milling metal. This can be moved in
any direction in a horizontal plane. Rotational motion could be added later. A
stereoscopic video microscope, looks down on the bugs鈥� world and can be moved up
and down. The microscope magnifies the insects 100 times and transmits the
images to a VR headset, where the stereoscopic display shows the insects in
three dimensions.
A gyroscopic tracker attached to the headgear monitors the user鈥檚 head
movements. When you move your head to the left or to the right, a laptop
converts the signal into instructions that move the insect platform one way or
another along the x-axis. If you move your head up and down, the
platform moves in the y-axis. You control the microscope鈥檚 height above
the platform with a small hand-held trackball. The platform only has to move
millimetres to translate into relatively long 鈥渋nsect distances鈥�, so software
had to ensure that large head movements don鈥檛 make the platform move too far.
鈥淭he effect is certainly to bring you down to their scale,鈥� says Malzbender.
The system will be demonstrated this week at an emerging technology
conference in San Jose, California. Zoos and aquaria are already interested in
the system, says Malzbender. 鈥淭hey can鈥檛 do anything with insects because they
are too small.鈥�
鈥淭his sounds like a wonderful tool for someone who鈥檚 learning about nature,
to get them excited and make it more tangible for them,鈥� says entomologist Jay
Rosenheim of the University of California, Davis.
For more authenticity, Malzbender wants to build in a 鈥渕icromechanical
feedback system鈥� using shape-memory alloy wire鈥攚hose length is
electrically controllable. This would let users touch the insects. 鈥淰elvet ants
are extremely aggressive. You can certainly imagine, if the mechanics were
there, interacting and having a contest with an insect like that,鈥� he says.
Arm-wrestling with an ant, anyone?