Renaud Bastien (CRCA, Toulouse) -Perceptual Matter and the Virtual Reality Experimental Machine

Living organisms move through space, search for food sources, mate, and, in social species, coordinate their activities. Individuals provide an adapted response to their environment through the perception of external stimuli, i.e. the intensity of physical parameters such as light or gravity. Understanding how organisms integrate environmental and social information to organize their behaviors is a fundamental question at different scales of life, from bacteria to vertebrates.

To address this problem, I propose a coherent framework for perceptual interactions coupling generalized models and virtual reality experiments. The constant interaction between experiments and modeling is essential. Indeed, the models partly dictate the experimental designs. The measurements obtained then allow us to test theoretical predictions and refine the models.

I will detail how we can build minimal models to relate perception and movements, and highlight their differences with purely physical descriptions. Because of the geometric nature of vision, it appears as a good starting point to explore the relationship between sensory information and behaviors. Virtual Reality is an illusion where individuals can move and interact with a computer-generated world. The visual field of each individual can be finely tuned in complex and dynamic environments. I will show how to harness the potential of Virtual Reality to design open automated experimental systems.