Navigating Dynamic Landscapes

Our work on the perception of energies asks how moving individuals detect and interpret forms of environmental energy that cannot be seen directly. We are especially interested in human pilots because, like soaring animals, they must negotiate dynamic airflows, locate usable uplift, and make rapid decisions under uncertainty. The difference is that humans can also share their knowledge with us directly. This gives us a rare opportunity to combine high-precision movement data with first-hand accounts of what individuals saw, sensed, expected and decided in flight.

Using paragliders as a model system, we combine high-tech, high-precision tracking with inertial sensors, video-based reconstruction, and measures of head and body orientation to examine how pilots move through shared airspace, what cues they attend to, and how they interpret the movements of others. By linking these reconstructions to subsequent movement decisions and flight performance, we can begin to quantify how social attention operates in real time and how information flows through groups moving in three-dimensional space.

Because paragliders face many of the same aerodynamic challenges as soaring birds, this system offers a fascinating route into questions that are otherwise very difficult to access directly in wild animals, and provides rare insight into how a bird may experience the energetic structure of the sky.