Virtual reality beginning to take off in the poultry house
The National Chicken Council (NCC) announced last month that it had developed a series of 360 degree virtual reality videos showing the various stages of a chicken’s life during modern, commercial production.
Other forms of virtual reality are being trialled at the University of Iowa by Professor Austin Stewart, who has developed Second Livestock, which places virtual reality headsets on chickens.
This allows them to enjoy the free range live wherever they area, even if they live their lives in a colony building.
Virtual Free Range combines the physical and psychological benefits of free range life with the safety and security of conventional agriculture. Chickens are free to roam, socialise and even eat “virtual food”, which appears in the virtual world where their real food trays are located.
Training can be boosted through virtual reality particularly in processing lines. For example, virtual reality can be used to train line workers how to trim meat, walk through a house without disturbing the birds or even how check the animals.
Researchers at Georgia Tech’s Agricultural Technology Research Programme have designed two systems that project graphical instructions from an automated inspection system onto birds on a processing line. These symbols tell workers how to trim or whether to discard defective products.
See the full story here: https://www.poultryworld.net/Meat/Articles/2018/8/Virtual-reality-beginning-to-take-off-in-the-poultry-house-321943E/