Dottorato in FISICA

Titolo della tesi: Virtual micro-reality: immersive manipulation of live microscopic systems

For more than three centuries we have been watching and studying microscopic phenomena behind a microscope. We discovered that cells live in a physical environment whose predominant factors are no longer those of our scale and for which we lack a direct experience and consequently a deep intuition. In this thesis we show a new instrument which, by integrating holographic and virtual reality technologies, allows the user to be completely immersed in a dynamic virtual world which is the simultaneous replica of a real system under the microscope. A 3-axis implementation of holographic microscopy provides fast 3D imaging for the real-time rendering on a virtual reality headset. At the same time, hand tracking data is used to dynamically generate holographic optical traps that can be used as virtual projections of the user hands to interactively grab and manipulate ensembles of micro-particles or living motile cells.