Featured Image Credit: The M2C2 Research Collaborative
Researchers have got quite the new toy for some lucky dolphin residents of the National Aquarium in Baltimore, Maryland. It’s not a smartphone, but it’s pretty darn close.
A combined team from Hunter College and Rockefeller University have joined together to create an interactive system for the National Aquarium’s dolphins.
The screen is built on the outside of an underwater window, so that no part of the device is submerged or dangerous to the dolphins. What makes this even cooler? Is that the “touch” screen detects the dolphins’ choice using optical technology.
Sure, that doesn’t make it a true “touch screen”, but it makes it kind of cooler than one.
We all know that dolphins are incredibly smart creatures, and while if they’re clever enough for the likes of Candy Crush or Angry Birds remains to be seen, they’re apparently getting the hang of a specialized Whack-A-Mole game pretty quickly.
Their version, of course, involves tapping on fish as they appear and “swim” across the screen, and Diana Reiss, Professor in the Department of Psychology at Hunter College and a part of the team for the study recalled how a younger dolphin, Foster, even understood it without any encouragement or instruction by the team, showing “immediate interest and expertise” in the game.
The system is fully interactive and was developed to “engage the dolphins without requiring explicit training. It is an open system in which the dolphins’ use of the touchscreen will shape how the system evolves,” says Ana Hocevar, a postdoctoral research scientist, as well as the mind behind the hardware and its functionality.
All of the dolphins’ progress will be monitored via underwater video cameras and microphones set up around the pool.
Further than just creating a different connection, new insight, and way to communicate with the dolphins, the team behind the research also hopes it will inspire “increased empathy toward dolphins and inspire global policies for their protection.”