By listening to the music as you move through the VR spider web, you can see and hear these structural changes, giving you a better idea of how spiders see the world, he told CNN.
“Spiders have very sharp vibration sensors, they use vibrations as a way to orient themselves, to communicate with other spiders. The idea of thinking literally like a spider, the world would experience, was something that for us as scientists of spider material was very obvious, ‘Buehler said.
Spiders are able to build their websites without scaffolding or props, so if they have a better idea of how they work, this could lead to the development of advanced new 3D printing techniques.
They scanned the web while the spider was building it, and Buehler likens it to a string instrument that changes as the structure becomes more complicated.
“While playing the guitar, new strings will suddenly appear and come up and grow,” he said.
Buehler said they recorded the vibrations that spiders create during various activities, such as building a web, courting signals, and communicating with other spiders, and that they use artificial intelligence to create synthetic versions.
“We might start to be able to speak the language of a spider,” he said. “The hope is that we can then play it back on the web structure to improve the ability to communicate with the spider and perhaps stimulate the spider to act in a certain way, to act on the signals in a certain way. respond.”
He said work was still in progress and that they had to close their laboratory due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
In addition to the scientific value, Buehler said that the webs are musically interesting and that you can hear the melodies that the spider creates during construction.
“It’s unusual and whimsical and scary, but ultimately beautiful,” he said.
“The reason I did this is because I wanted to transfer information from the spider perspective, which is very atonal and strange and haunting, if you will, to something more human,” Buehler said.