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Michael Reiser is, as he puts it, “fanatical about timing”. A neuroscientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, Reiser studies fly vision. Some of his experiments involve placing flies in an immersive virtual-reality arena and seamlessly redrawing the scene while tracking how the insects respond. Modern PCs, with their complex operating systems and multitasking central processing units (CPUs), cannot guarantee the temporal precision required. So Reiser, together with engineers at Sciotex, a technology firm in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, found a piece of computing hardware that could: an FPGA.
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