playground

Control Console that integrate Jovian (Virtual Reality Platform) and Spiketag (Real-time Ephys)

Mouse and Rats or even human play in playground

• It bidirectionally communicate with Jovian (through socket)
• It bidirectionally communicate FPGA (through PCIE interface)
• It bidirectionally communicate user (through low-latency rendering and interaction)

Functionality and Time budget

The time budget comes from the fact that the playground continuously receive VR stream from Jovian and feedback decision to Jovian every frame. If the frame rate is 60 then the time budget is 1/60=16.6ms. That means the following functionality needs to be done within this time budget

1. Real-time GPU rendering for trajectory/events visualization (Navigation View)
2. User interaction (could be a script) (A QT5 Console)
3. Real-time Ephys signal visualization/interaction (Extension of spiketag)
4. Behaviour protocol FSM that takes behavour/Ephys as input and output events (Rule)
5. User interaction can overwrite the FSM to send command to Jovian (Interaction)

To see this in a finer level we decompose it into 3 stages:

Pre-stage processing

1. Parse the Jovian Maze created in Blender into Mesh object that can be rendered in playground
2. Parse the Maze objects coordination which will be used by behaviour protocol FSM

FSM Loop processing (FSM loop constrained by time budget)

1. Define behave variable (Jovian stream contains position, head direction, speed)
2. Define ephys variable (spiketag stream contains ripple, spikes identity, theta etc. )
3. Define object variable which is by default Maze objects coordination (reword location, cue location, wall location)
4. Define rule (A FSM receive inputs from behave variable, ephys variable, and object variable and issue events)
5. Define events (issued by rule based on the interaction between behave/ephys/object variables)
6. Define score (convert events into measurement of animal's performance)

Note:

• behave variable and object variable interact to generate events
• events and rule interact to generate measurement
• measurement can influence rule to make it dynamic
• user can top-down control behave variable, object variable, rule but not events and score

GUI Loop (interaction/visualization loop constrained by time budget)

1. Define button and keymapping for setting states of GUI
2. states of GUI such as: reading behave variable; reading ephys variable; operating FSM; feeding back events to Jovian; view states etc..
3. navigation view for low-latency rendering variable, trajectory and events
4. Define key+mouse event in navigation view to mimic FSM loop output true events
5. List FSM state and events log online
6. Save File Options

Post-stage processing

1. Save the trajectory file
2. Save the event log
3. Save the measurement log