VR Tech Lets People Interact With Rats

cylonlover writes "The EU Commission's Community Research and Development Information Service (CORDIS) is working on a 'beaming' telepresence system that is designed to allow users to virtually experience being in a remote location by seeing, hearing and even feeling that location through the sensory inputs of a robot located there. That robot, in turn, would relay the user's speech and movements to the people at that location. Now, two of the CORDIS partners have put an interesting slant on the technology – they've used it to let people interact with rats."

I have a different term for it

[MyLongNickName]

I have a different term for it. I call it consulting my lawyer.

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[dkleinsc]

So do I: I call it "reading Youtube comments".

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[NettiWelho]

I though that was called "snake handling".

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[Anonymous Coward]

not be confused with "playing with your junk"

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[DaveAtFraud]

Damn. I have mod points. I went to mod this as "insightful" and fat fingered the mod menu so I dinged the comment as "Redundant" (which in some ways it is but not to the point of modding it down). So, the gist of this comment is I get my mod point back, your comment gets bumped back up to where it was and, unfortunately, now I can't mod it up either since I've posted to the discussion.

At leats it's Friday.

Cheers,
Dave

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[MyLongNickName]

Well, you won't get your mod point back but thanks for the explanation.

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[Obfuscant]

Well, having just been haranged by a Google web specialist at work about my company's "web presence" (because they scraped the Network Solutions database for a domain long ago expired), I'd say that it's called "talking to a telemarketer".

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[antdude]

Aren't lawyers, sharks?

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[Black Parrot]

Cue the Farside comic w/ Prof. Metzbaum and his dog-translation helmet.

(Sorry, I can't find it on the innerweb.)

they took all the fun out of it

[shadowrat]

They made this tech that would let you pilot a small robot around and then hid everything behind some lame AR game? wtf? I dream of a day when i can pilot a mini drone down into an ant colony, or into a pond or something. That seems awesome. That dream doesn't include pretending the ants look like people though. I either want to just play a game where what's represented to me as ants are actually people (pretty much the way multiplayer games work now), or just have a real time feed from my little robot int

want fun? try a haiku

[marcello_dl]

the voice of the telepresence bot
like rustling autumn leaves
it's your mother in law

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[BotnetZombie]

counting is your friend
when constructing a haiku
5-7-5 it is

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[Hatta]

Why are they using a rat sized robot? Why not an actual robo-rat [newscientist.com]?

The possibilities are endless!

[Rhacman]

I'm imagining a reality show where contestants are 'piloting' robotic telepresence pack animals like wolves. Your objective is to gain control of a pack of real wild animals and to lead them in battle against the packs lead by the other contestants. The winner recieves a lifetime supply of raw meat, den building materials, and psycological counseling.

Apparently these people

[Black Parrot]

have never had a regular job.

Welcome to the REAL Rat race....

[rts008]

Please tell me there will be mazes, electric shocks, and cheese involved ! ;-)

What is this, Farm Science Week?

[bradorsomething]

Interacting with rats... hugging chickens... [slashdot.org] I think scientists are misunderstanding the needs of our society.

CORDIS, jeez!

[janoc]

Guys, you do realize that CORDIS is the name of the web portal for EU-funded research projects and not a research team nor institution? It is a portal website for the grant-related bureaucracy - like publishing calls for proposals and aggregating information on projects being funded. Saying that "CORDIS is working on something" is like saying that Google Scholar is working on a research project.
The project above is actually being done by University College London, it is even in that damn article!
This is

Kinect ?

[NinjaTekNeeks]

Kinect motion tracking is actually very good, using Kinect motions to control an avatar (robot) would be a good way to leverage existing research and technology. I'm actually surprised we don't have Kinect Battle bots yet....

You need VR tech for that?

[wonkey_monkey]

And there was me thinking you could just go the pet shop.

Socrates, is that you?

[milbournosphere]

Other than the possibility of naming the rat Ben and using it to take out their boss, I don't see what could possibly go wrong.

Finally!

[emudoug42]

This is it. The culmination of the human experience. Countless generations led us here, to this point in time -- this glorious point in time, in which man has finally done it! We can now interact with rats via robots. We're done here, humans. We've won. Anything else form here on out is just frosting on the cake.

Paging Dr Dolittle.

[Ostracus]

The rat was remotely represented by a computer-generated human avatar, which the person in Mundet saw via a head-mounted virtual reality display – whatever the rat did in Bellvitge, its animated human representative appeared to do in Mundet.

So one could watch a human lick it's balls?

In IMAX 3D, yet!

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

> VR Tech Lets People Interact With Rats

Apparently, so does Hurricane Sandy [slashdot.org].