Team:IONIS Paris/Project/Microfluidics

MICROFLUIDICS

What is Microfluidics?

Manipulating and controlling fluids

Microfluidics is the science and technology of manipulating and controlling fluids, usually in the range of micro liters (10-6) to pico liters (10-12), in networks of channels with lowest dimensions from ten to hundred micrometers. This emerging discipline takes its origin in the early 1990s and has known a dramatic growth since then, partly due to the increasing popularity of microscale analytical chemistry techniques and the development of microelectronic technologies.

A very attractive technology

Microfluidics is a very attractive technology for both academic researchers and industrials since it considerably:
Decreases sample and reagent consumptions
Shortens time of experiments and doing so
Reduces the overall costs of applications

Thanks to the low volume required, microfluidics represents a promising alternative to conventional laboratory techniques as it allows achieving complete laboratory protocols on a single chip of few square centimeters.

			
					Microfluidics 
				
					Bio-Console
				
					Light signals
				
					BACT'MAN

Microfluidics chip

Our Bio-Console

Introduction

Our first goal in this game is to interact with the real world throw a computer game. The game is based on the movement of a bubble in a microfluidic system, then we add a virtual part to the microscope video and integrate our virtual game.

The bubble detection

First of all, we add to detect the bubble in the system, so we use the Hough circle detection algorithm to find it and return it position. We decided to use a microfluidic chip of 1,2x1,6 cm of size with 0,3 mm sized channels. The detection have to find the bubble of 0,3 mm diameter in a channel used as a circuit. To detect the bubble, the contrast between the bubble and the environment have to be sufficient to locate the bubble in the microscope image. So, we decided to use a transparent and blue environment to respect this contrast.

The game part

Once we have detected the bubble in the image, we have to integrate it into a game, the location of the bubble gives us a position in the image and a size, and the virtual part can be added to interact with the bubble. All the virtual part is construct like a game engine, we have the Game User Interface engine (GUI engine), the Graphical engine, the Physical engine, etc. The bubble has also its own virtual part to interact with the virtual world. As we said, the player has to move the bubble into the chip from a beginning point to the end of the circuit, and this circuit have a lot of virtual objects like lasers, checkpoints, etc. The player have to interact with the bubble to dodge the lasers, and if he touch one off them, the game detect a collision between the bubble detected with our Hough circle detection and the virtual laser. That’s how we interact between the real world and our virtual world.