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- Depending on which science fiction you want to reference, the researchers here at the University of Konstanz in Germany have either built a holodeck from "Star Trek," or "The Matrix," or something kind of like the old alien abductions from "The X-Files." It's just that they've built it for locusts. - One of the great challenges in studying collective behavior is that there's this intricate network of interactions among the individuals that we can't see, we can't control. And so, it's really difficult to understand how these locusts, with their local interactions, can scale up to swarms that can extend across hundreds of square kilometers. We thought, "What if we could have individuals "moving and interacting with virtual swarms?" And so, that's why we've designed this setup. What we do is we put the animal on this large, motion-compensating sphere. As the animal moves, the sphere always moves to keep it on top and so, it can move in a never-ending desert environment. And by tracking