The perceived effects of augmented trail sensing and mood recognition abilities in a human–fish biohybrid system

Abstract

The use of technologies to enhance human and animal perceptions has been explored in frontier research about artificial life and biohybrid systems. These attempts have revealed that augmented sensing abilities can emerge new interactions between individuals within or across species. Nevertheless, the diverse effects of different augmented capabilities are less examined and compared. In this work, we built a human-fish biohybrid system that enhanced the ornamental fish’s vision by projecting human participants onto the arena background. In contrast, human participants were equipped with a mix-reality device, which visualized fish individuals’ trails (representing situation-oriented perceptions) and emotions (representing communication-oriented perceptions). We investigated the impacts of the two enhanced perceptions on the human side and documented the perceived effects in three aspects. First, both augmented perceptions considerably increase participants’ attention toward ornamental fish, and the impact of emotion recognition is more potent than trail sense. Secondly, the frequency of human-fish interactions increases with the equipped perceptions. And the mood recognition ability on the human side can indirectly promote the recorded positive mood of fish. Thirdly, most participants mentioned they felt closer to those fish with the mood recognition ability, even if we added some mistakes in the accuracy of mood recognition. In contrast, the addition of trail sensing ability cannot bring in a similar effect on the mental bond. These findings reveal several aspects of different perceived effects between the enhancements of communication-oriented and situation-oriented perceptions.

Animal–robot interaction—an emerging field at the intersection of biology and robotics

“…A unique ARIS is described by Hu et al [16] which brings a group of fish together into a closed-loop interaction with human actors via a technological interface, so that both, fish and humans, perceive an enhanced VR-augmented environmental experience. The results of these experiments indicate that such artificially enhanced closed loop interactions have an effect on the general mood and on the exhibited behaviors on both sides.…”