Through hawks' eyes: reconstructing a bird's visual field in flight to study gaze strategy and attention during perching and obstacle avoidance

We present a method to analyse visual attention of a bird in flight, that combines motion capture data with renderings from virtual cameras. We applied it to a small subset of a larger dataset of perching and obstacle avoidance manoeuvres, and studied visual field stabilisation and gaze shifts. Our approach allows us to synthesise visual cues available to the bird during flight, such as depth information and optic flow, which can lead to novel insights into the birds gaze strategy in flight. This preliminary work demonstrates the method and suggests several new hypotheses to investigate with the full dataset.