Scientists make tiny 3D glasses for insects to understand how they see the World

Scientists fitted praying mantises with tiny 3D glasses to understanding how they see the world, and discovered the insects have a “completely new form” of ”stereo” sight unlike that of any other known creature. Scientists placed the creatures in front of an “insect cinema” which showed them 3D projections of prey as well as the types of complex dot-patterns used to study human vision. They found that while humans 3D stereo vision works by matching up the details of the picture viewed by each eye, mantises’ 3D sight only worked for moving images.

“Mantises only attack moving prey, so their 3D doesn’t need to work in still images,” said behavioural ecologist Vivek Nityananda, one of the authors of the study. “We found mantises don’t bother about the details of the picture, but just look for places where the picture is changing.” The team found that the mantis can track movement even when each eye is presented with completely different images. In a human, this would result in an incomprehensible picture.

“This is a completely new form of 3D vision as it is based on change over time instead of static images,” said Dr Vivek Nityananda. “In mantises it is probably designed to answer the question ‘is there prey at the right distance for me to catch?’”