Three More Years at Loopbio

The previous post covered the first year of Loopbio. This one covers 2017 to 2019. Over those three years the apparatus turned into two products: Motif and Loopy.

Motif is the recording system. It is built for long, reliable recording; one customer’s machine recorded for more than two hundred days without failing. Around it we build the multi-camera, high-megapixel rigs that harder questions require. In 2019 we shipped Motif 5, which adds real-time closed-loop processing rather than recording alone; sensor and DAQ I/O, so that EEG, audio, optogenetic stimulation and video are written to one synchronised file; outputs it can drive as well as read; Windows support; and support for more than five hundred cameras.

Loopy , launched in 2018, does in a browser what previously took a folder of scripts: organise the video, code and score the behaviour, and track the animals, the last with deep-learning assistance. Its use more than doubled in 2019, with several departments moving over to it. There is a free trial .

The main work of the three years was the science it was used for. In 2017 our paper Virtual reality for freely moving animals was published in Nature Methods, with me as first author. It tracks a freely moving animal and redraws a perspective-correct world around it fast enough that the animal responds to it; we made it work for flies, fish and mice, and open-sourced the engine as FreemoVR . The fish version became hardware: the FishVR rigs now running in Iain Couzin’s lab, where a real fish and a photorealistic virtual one share a tank, and the real fish schools with the rendered one.

The same infrastructure was used across a wide range of work: deep-learning pose estimation in the DeepPoseKit paper from the Couzin lab (eLife, 2019); the neurons behind Drosophila courtship song, in the Murthy lab (Current Biology, 2019); the marine worm Platynereis and its circadian rhythm, in Kristin Tessmar-Raible’s group; bees photographed inside a hive; manakins recorded in the field; wolves; C. elegans in camera arrays; and an artist’s “arachnid orchestra” of spiders. The same tools carried flies, fish, worms, birds and spiders, which was the case for building general infrastructure rather than one apparatus.

We also did more outside the workshop: Goettingen again, ASAB in Konstanz, and our first booth at SfN in Chicago. We moved into an office in central Vienna, on Lange Gasse, and partnered with Traverse Science to carry Loopy into the North American pre-clinical and large-animal market.

Three years in, Loopbio is a company with two products and several hundred scientists using them. The daily work has moved from building hardware to support, scale, and shipping software that people depend on.