These Praying Mantises Wear Tiny 3-D Glasses—For Science
New developments in a study on praying mantis vision show their 3-D capabilities are more complex than previously thought.
This previously unknown type of vision is based on object movement over time and operates under relatively unsophisticated brain-power. Scientists are working on an algorithm that imitates mantis sight in hopes to help develop vision in robots.
Read and her colleagues at Newcastle University in the U.K. have built the first cinema just for insects—specifically, praying mantises wearing tiny 3-D glasses.
Their goal: To confirm that praying mantises can see in 3-D, an ability scientists call stereopsis, or binocular vision.
The results, published recently in Scientific Reports, show that they do. (See "Wasps Can Recognize Faces.")
Animals that see in stereopsis use small differences in an object’s location perceived by the right and left eye to calculate how far away the
