Was geht in meinem Hund vor? - Süddeutsche Zeitung

Das fragen sich Millionen Frauchen und Herrchen. Kathrin Brunner und Oliver Czeslik arbeiten an einer Antwort. Mithilfe einer Virtual-Reality-Brille wollen sie zeigen, wie Hunde die Welt sehen

English bellow

What's going on inside my dog?

Millions of owners ask themselves this question. Kathrin Brunner and Oliver Czeslik are working on an on an answer. With the help of virtual reality goggles, they want to show how dogs see the world.

von michael bremmer

Lucky is sitting on the sidewalk. He stretches his muzzle forward. Sniffs. Next to him people are standing in line and buy a schnitzel roll from the butcher here in Pasing. Or a pork loin in dark sauce, the lunch special on this Thursday at the end of April. Lucky, a five-year-old silver Labrador, is a guide dog for the blind. The minutes, he has been guiding Ilona Robilier, his visually impaired mistress, through the hustle and bustle of Pasing's Bahnhofsplatz to the butcher's shop. A place he had already visited the two days before. A place where he last got a sausage.

Lucky waits for his moment of happiness. Kathrin Brunner has another thought: "How can we visualize this olfactory sensation?"

Lucky has a camera strapped to him. His recordings will not simply be seen as a film. It's about more. It is about questions that probably interest all dog owners: How does a dog look at the world? How does he see people? What does he feel when he interacts with them? The virtual reality experience "i wanna be ur dog" is intended to provide answers to these questions of the dog. Or as Kathrin Brunner expresses it: "We are trying to sensory perception of the dog into virtual reality and thus make it possible for us humans to experience it." Of the dog owners in the three planned episodes, body data will be measured, which will be visualized.

Kathrin Brunner and her husband Oliver Czeslik, managing directors of "Myndstorm Productions" based in Haar and Berlin, are currently on a virtual exploration tour. Artificial intelligence and virtual reality (VR) are changing the world of the viewing habits. And thus also the way of storytelling and filmmaking. Technological developments are just turning everything upside down, Brunner says. "Innovations are being created right now that are technical and artistic areas that will shape our lives in ten or twenty years. How we move through virtual worlds will be something that will accompany us much more in our everyday lives." And: "The rules of storytelling are being being reinvented, and we want to be part of that."

“It is a new world - and they are there from the beginning”

Kathrin Brunner stands on the station square in Pasing. All day long they have been shooting for "i wanna be ur dog". The equipment is stored in a cargo bike provided by the city of Munich, the crew, nine men and women, are sitting in the outdoor area of a café, and two dogs are with them, Lucky and Sammy. Everything should be ready by the end of the year, available in the virtual reality app store.

A look inside. That's what Kathrin Brunner and Oliver Czeslik are all about. Creating insights that are normally hidden from people. This was already the case with their award-winning journey into the brain, "Mind the Brain. And now Insights into a dog's life.

On this day, guide dog Lucky is a camera dog. The impressions he gathers are recorded from his perspective. And since a dog has sensory red-green vision, the color scheme is to be adjusted later. In addition, the surroundings will be photographed, documented and converted into a three-dimensional VR world. The Pasing train station as a kind of game world in which the user can move and look around 360 degrees, also from the Labrador's point of view - "just as we imagine Lucky experiencing the world," says Brunner.

But that alone is too simplistic. Every time the dog is turned, data is recorded by the person who is with the dog. Heartbeat, blood volume, muscle tension, skin conductivity - this allows conclusions to be drawn about stress factors. derived. Reactions of the body that the dog also the dog perceives. To make this data visible to the viewer, they have developed a so-called holistic being. An avatar with heartbeat, breathing. A figure that you can see whether it is excited or calm at the moment.

Brunner and Czeslik have a dog themselves. But their own experience is not enough for this VR experience. "We have acquired extensive expertise and studied dog perception intensively in advance," explains Brunner. Also on her team are guide dog trainer Claudia Detzer and Florinda Bogner, who works as a dog trainer and knows how dogs perceive people.

The Film-Fernseh-Fonds Bayern (FFF) funded the development of this virtual reality experience with 30,000 euros and the production with 95,000 euros. "Creativity and technology continue to grow together in Bavaria as a media location," FFF Managing Director Dorothee Erpenstein explained last year. "The FFF funding areas for VR and XR are still young, and it is impressive what the companies have achieved in such a short time in terms of various high-quality and imaginative experiences and applications have realized."

It's a new world. And Kathrin Brunner and Oliver Czeslik have been there from the beginning. Brunner, born in 1971, grew up in Haar near Munich. She studied business administration at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and earned her doctorate on "Organization Theory in Times of Globalization." She specialized in digital media, digital media distribution and content development, worked in leading positions at the Warner/Bertelsmann joint venture in2movies, Deutsche Telekom and Discovery Communications. Czeslik, born in 1964, is a playwright, screenwriter and producer. He gained fame in 1992 when his play "Holy Cows" was performed at the Schaubühne in Berlin and later filmed for WDR. As a team, they complement each other wonderfully. Czeslik, the artist, makes references to cultural history and sets quotations, and Brunner, the pragmatic one, knows exactly how to implement everything - or better: she knows which support they need to make it all happen.

And yet it was a stroke of fate that was decisive for the beginning of "Myndstorm Production". Czeslik had a stroke in 2016, could no longer understand conversations, had paralysis in his hands and feet. In his recovery phase, he experienced "the miracle of the brain." Nerve cells reconnected, he experienced a new perception, realized "how wonderfully interconnected the brain is," Brunner says.

Even then, the idea took hold for the poetic journeyinside the brain, "a journey into the center of one's own narration," as Czeslik calls it - without knowing at the time how they could implement it. "What I experienced myself, I wanted to make accessible to others," Czeslik says. "We quickly knew we couldn't make it happen on our own. We needed scientific and artistic support," Brunner says. The list of collaborations for "Mind the Brain" is substantial:

Juliane Fuchs and other researchers from Bauhaus University Weimar, scientists from the Human Brain Project at Forschungszentrum Jülich, arthouse director Fred Kelemen, composer Nirto Karsten Fischer, brain-computer interface experts, VR specialists, 3-D artists and several more. "The goal was," says Czeslik, "was for art and science to create and expand a new form of poetic perception and expand it." The starting point was an artistic visualization of scientific images of the brain. But not as documentation; the user should experience the brain for himself through interaction.

A visit to the Deutsches Museum in the fall at the Hi A Festival for Art and Media. It all starts with a bang on the gong. A young man, Leon, sits slightly elevated. He is wearing VR glasses. He is also connected to a brain-computer interface via a sensor hood. The electrodes measure the activity of the brain - and these brain waves in turn influence the journey through the brain. What Leon sees through the VR goggles is projected onto projected onto screens.

The journey starts in a kind of cathedral. The basis was also scientific representations of the main networks in the brain. From there, it goes through an optically represented optic nerve and a forest of neurons to end up in the plane of thoughts and dreams. Spherical organ sounds fill the adjoining room on the second floor of the Deutsches Museum. The screen is dark, white dots flow through the room. Like a swarm of insects. A lava flow. A nebula of stars. Dots form themselves into objects. A deer can be seen.

Up to the level of thoughts the journey is all come to this place. But everything that happens here depends on the brain waves of the viewer. In this case Leon. The sensors on his head react to tension. Whoever tries to control the half-hour thought journey will not get far. Whoever lets go, whoever is relaxed, will get further in the realm of thoughts. Into the realm of images. Almost 60 images are stored there in a basic model based on the archetypes of C. G. Jung, the founder of analytical psychology. Images from the apocalyptic horseman to the embryo. the embryo. Humans are to be discovered. Or even animals like the stag. "Many people associate these images with a a very personal story," says Brunner.

“Lucky realizes: The door to the sausage is closed. He must rethink”

And so now from the brain to the dog. Why is that? "Based on 'Mind The Brain!', we know that there are things that at first that at first seem invisible to us, even though they are always around us - including diseases," says Czeslik. Dogs could perceive these things "and make us more sensitive to a poetization of the world. We have also experienced this through our Sammy - humans and animals can initiate healing processes together."

There is another aspect. People who have a pet know how valuable such a coexistence can be. can be. "It's about the understanding relationship between living beings," says Kathrin Brunner. Understanding among each other is a desire that is close to her heart. Even more so in times of crisis.

Lucky sits in front of the butcher shop. There is less hustle and bustle here than minutes before at the train station. The hustle and bustle of commuters. The background noise of the traffic, the streetcar in the direction of Berg am Laim, the bus in the direction of Schloss Blutenburg. The constantly changing smells, the fast food store, the stand with roasted nuts, the kebab grill. But as a guide dog, Lucky is not distracted by this. It's quieter here at the butcher's shop. The Labrador knows the place, he always got a sausage here the days before. But today the front door is closed. Lucky's mistress Ilona Robilier has to queue up at the snack bar window, the Labrador stands to her left. Ilona Robilier orders a beef treat. Lucky sniffs. He stretches his muzzle forward. Looks up. What does the world looks like from his perspective?

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https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/was-denken-hunde-virtual-reality-kuenstliche-intelligenz-1.5579704?reduced=true

Mai 2022