From Fast Company: "The Air Force is funding research involving fruit flies and virtual reality tunnels, with an eye toward building "future insect-sized vehicles for the military."
Andrew Straw, a Caltech scientist who studies neurons and behavior, is leading the research, supported by an Air Force Office of Scientific Research grant. In order to better understand how fruit flies navigate, Straw basically forces the insects to play an immersive videogame of sorts. His lab has designed a virtual reality environment for the flies, giving him complete control over the visual stimuli they're exposed to. He and his fellow researchers also developed a tracking system that locates a fly in 3-D "nearly instantaneously." By tossing the fruit flies in the VR tunnel, controlling what the flies see, and tracking them precisely, Straw has an unprecedented sense of how the flies use visual cues to navigate.
What he found was surprising. Previously, it had been thought that flies measured motion beneath them to regulate their height. Straw's team, by contrast, has found that horizontal edges are the most important cue the flies use."
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