Abstract

At the department of neuroscience at Uppsala University one of theresearch groups are working with motion vision. Motion vision is how seeinganimal species process moving objects in their visual fields and how theyexperience self motion by generating an optic flow. This is important foranimals of all sizes, everything from large mammals to insects. At theneuroscience department at Uppsala University they are using flies in theirresearch as these are easier to work with than larger animals.Behavioral output as a result of visual stimuli is what is studied in theproject I have been involved in as a part of this thesis. This is done by atrack ball setup. The setup consists of a cup with a light plastic ball init, from the bottom of the cup light airflow is added to reduce frictionbetween the ball and the cup. A fly is tethered on top of the ball in such away that when the fly is trying to walk the ball instead rotates accordingly.The ball rotation can then be measured by two sensors, both of which havebeen extracted from an optical mouse. There is no available, ready-made, software for reading the raw mouse datafrom the two sensors and from that input reconstructs the virtual movementpath of the fly using. Therefore the purpose of this thesis has been todesign and implement a user friendly and functional software system thatfulfill this requirement.The design was done according to the principles of user-centered systemdesign although with less formal documentation. This proved to generate avery good result. The end-users were included in every phase of thedevelopment process and it really was a huge advantage for the developmentprocess. Although all of the methods made available by the theories were notfollowed religiously, especially regarding documentation, that just displayedthe power of agile methods were quality is more important than documentation.And the evaluation at the end of the project showed that the level ofusability was high.