Virtual is the new reality

• 来源期刊: 动物学报（英文版）
• 年，卷（期）: 2017,（1）
• 页码范围: 1-4
• 页数: 4页
• 语种: 中文
• DOI: 10.1093/cz/zow119

摘要

Virtual stimuli:the Next-generation Stimuli The ideal animal stimulus is under total control of the experimenter,has visual traits,and behavior patterns that can be varied in any way,and it appears and behaves consistently between test trials that can be easily repeated many times and any time.Does this sound like wishful thinking of a biologist? Using and exploiting the potential of artificial stimuli in animal behavior research is actually not a new idea.Even in the time of Tinbergen,researchers used wood,clay,or other materials to build artificial dummy animals that would allow control over the presentation of the animal stimulus (Ter Pelkwijk and Tinbergen 1937).Since then,the idea of artificial model animals has evolved alongside technology.Even if still used today in its original form (Kim and Velando 2014),clay and wood models have inspired the use of robots,engineering objects that are specifically tuned for the standardized presentation of preprogrammed movement patterns (Martins et al.2005;Landgraf et al.2008;Landgraf et al.2014).Meanwhile,researchers also started to film live animals and played back these videos to replace live animal stimuli.Rapidly these videos started to be edited,reaching a point where,today,the complete scene,including the stimulus animal is created.Continuous advances in the computer graphics sector and increasing access to high-quality free software solutions also eased these technological advances.