BEAMING project: enabling real-time interaction between humans and between human and rat
The TV series Star Trek originally popularised the idea of instantaneous transportation of people to distant places. This involved decomposition of human bodies and objects into their atomic constituents, and then reconstruction at the remote location. Clearly such technology is perhaps centuries away even if it could ever be realised. Today there is an alternative technology that aims to realise the same idea but through quite different means. We refer to the idea of ʻbeamingʼ as digitally transporting a representation of yourself to a distant place, where you can interact with the people there, as if you were there.
The European BEAMING project, scientifically led by the University of Barcelona, combines virtual reality, tracking and teleoperation technology to digitally transport a representation of a person to a distant place, where he/she can interact —even physically— with the people there, as if they were there. The visitor to the remote place is represented there by a physical robot. A new experiment used this technology to create an interactive experience that involved a human and a rat, each at their own scale.
The TV series Star Trek originally popularised the idea of instantaneous transportation of people to distant places. This involved decomposition of human bodies and objects into their atomic constituents, and then reconstruction at the remote location. Clearly such technology is perhaps centuries away even if it could ever be realised. Today there is an alternative technology that aims to realise the same idea but through quite different means. We refer to the idea of ʻbeamingʼ as digitally transporting a representation of yourself to a distant place, where you can interact with the people there, as if you were there.
The European BEAMING project, scientifically led by the University of Barcelona, combines virtual reality, tracking and teleoperation technology to digitally transport a representation of a person to a distant place, where he/she can interact —even physically— with the people there, as if they were there. The visitor to the remote place is represented there by a physical robot. A new experiment used this technology to create an interactive experience that involved a human and a rat, each at their own scale.
Mel Slater is the ICREA professor scientifically leading the European project BEAMING from the Faculty of Psycology of the University of Barcelona. The project has some international collaborators from all around Europe; among them we highlight the team led by Dr M. Victoria Sánchez-Vives, ICREA professor at the August Pi i Sunyer Biomedical Research Centre (IDIBAPS). The BEAMING consortium, including partners from L'UNAM University (Nantes, France), Guger Technologies (Austria), University College London (UK) and Technical University of Munich (Germany), publishes in PLoS ONE a new study where the interactive experience involved a human and a rat, each at their own scale.
This is achieved through a combination of virtual reality and teleoperator systems. The visitor to the remote place (the destination) is represented there ideally by a physical robot. Such rapid transportation to distant locations, where you have the strong feeling to be there, and where the local people in the destination experience you as there, has many economic and practical advantages. It is a step beyond approaches such as video conferencing which do not give participants the physical sensation of being in the same shared space, and certainly not the physical capability to actually carry out actions in that space.
The BEAMING project has achieved early examples of this goal, in relation to humans beaming to distant places and interacting with people there. For example, see how a scientist in Barcelona was digitally beamed to London to be interviewed by a BBC journalist there. It is just one of the multiple possible applications of such technology. In the framework of this project a system for remote medical assistance for patients at home that can be “transported” to the hospital is also being developed.
In this new paper published by PLoS ONE, researchers from the University of Barcelona and IDIBAPS further extend the beaming idea by showing how it is possible to beam to even what might be considered as ʻalien worldsʼ. We show how a person can be ʻbeamedʼ into a rat open arena, where the person interacts with the rat as if it were another person, and the rat interacts with a rat-sized robotic representation of the distant person. This not only shows the range of this technology, but also provides a new tool for scientists, explorers or others to visit distant and alien places without themselves being placed in any kind of danger, and importantly, to be able to see animal behaviour in a totally new way, as if it were the behaviour of humans.
So putting all this together, the rat interacted with a rat sized robot that represented the remotely located human, and the human interacted with a human sized avatar that represented the remotely located rat. In order to make the rat interested in the robot, a small tray attached to the robot body had some jelly on it, which the rats had previously eaten in some training sessions.
The humans in a small study interacted with the rat. They had to learn to entice the rat-avatar to go near some specific pictures in the virtual reality. The humans didnʼt know about the jelly on the robot, but they typically learned that the rats would follow them, so they had to draw the rats out of their normal behaviours (staying in the corners and staying close to the edges) to get them to move around so that both could stand by the same picture.
Overall the study showed that that the system technically performed well and that there could be an interesting interaction between the animal and the human and remotely located beings at different scales.