A research team at George Mason University in the US has developed hardware and software that allows the user to capture footage as if it were filmed through the eyes of animals. Most animals do not see the world the way we do – with each creature possessing a unique set of photoreceptors, with sensitivities […]
A research team at George Mason University in the US has developed hardware and software that allows the user to capture footage as if it were filmed through the eyes of animals.
Most animals do not see the world the way we do – with each creature possessing a unique set of photoreceptors, with sensitivities ranging from ultraviolet through infrared, adapted to their ecological needs.
As a result, each animal perceives colour differently, experiencing a completely different visual reality to us humans.
Neither our eyes nor commercial cameras capture these important nuances, so how can we view the secret world of animals from their perspective, to uncover more about ecology, agriculture, and general animal behaviour?
Scientists at the Virginia-based research university claim to have created a solution to this challenge, engineering a tool to record videos that represent the colours that animals can see.
Funded by the National Geographic Society and various departments at George Mason University, with support from the University of Virginia’s Blandy Experimental Farm, researchers hope that these tools will have a range of use cases.
To help facilitate this, they have made the software open source, encouraging everyone from natural history filmmakers and ecologists to farmers and outdoors enthusiasts to look at these animals’ vastly different viewpoints.
How it works
The tools were developed using multispectral photography, which captures light in diverse wavelengths, including in the infrared and ultraviolet ranges.
The camera records video in four colour channels: blue, green, red and UV – which are then processed to deliver footage through the eyes of a particular animal, based on what we already know about them.
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The team created a portable 3D-printed device that contains a beam splitter, separating UV from visible light, with each captured by a dedicated camera.
On its own, the UV-sensitive camera does not record perceivable data, but when paired together, they record high-quality video. Algorithms align the footage and present the visuals in the perspective of different animals’ sight.
In the study, the researchers used photoreceptor data for honeybees and the average, UV sensitive bird. However, researchers claim that that the camera can be applied to any organism “provided users supply data on photoreceptor sensitivity and those sensitivities overlap with the sensitivity of the camera system.”
The university said that the hardware is designed to suit commercially available cameras, and the researchers have made the software open-source, in the hope that others may want to adapt it for their own needs.
You can read the research paper, Recording animal-view videos of the natural world using a novel camera system and software package [PLoS Biol] here
