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’s just a day in the life of Tom
Malzbender’s 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. “I was always
enthralled by the diversity and the strangeness of that world,” says Malzbender,
who is now a computer scientist at Hewlett-Packard’s research lab in Palo Alto,
California.
To bring people face-to-face with these creatures, Malzbender and his
colleagues turned to “telepresence”—the experience of being present at a
location remote from one’s actual surroundings. They wanted to transport people
into a microscopic environment.
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Their bug-ridden world is a “field” 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’ 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’s 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’s height above
the platform with a small hand-held trackball. The platform only has to move
millimetres to translate into relatively long “insect distances”, so software
had to ensure that large head movements don’t make the platform move too far.
“The effect is certainly to bring you down to their scale,” 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. “They can’t do anything with insects because they
are too small.”
“This sounds like a wonderful tool for someone who’s learning about nature,
to get them excited and make it more tangible for them,” says entomologist Jay
Rosenheim of the University of California, Davis.
For more authenticity, Malzbender wants to build in a “micromechanical
feedback system” using shape-memory alloy wire—whose length is
electrically controllable. This would let users touch the insects. “Velvet ants
are extremely aggressive. You can certainly imagine, if the mechanics were
there, interacting and having a contest with an insect like that,” he says.
Arm-wrestling with an ant, anyone?