Vestibular and oculomotor
Controlled stimuli for canal and otolith work, gaze stabilization, vestibulo-ocular reflex and optokinetic paradigms, with pure-axis isolation a single-axis chair cannot deliver.
Uses · Research
Motion as a
controlled stimulus.
Research that uses motion as a stimulus asks for repeatable delivery, an interface that fits your recording chain, and no compensation in your data; whether the PDK meets your protocol is for your own validation to show. The Portal Development Kit (PDK) is supplied as a development kit for that research.
Development Kit: early-access hardware, software in active development.
What it is not ›Development uses ›A confound removed mechanically ›
Engineering figures.
<1 ms
latency, game to motion
3.3 kHz
control loop, dual ARM Cortex-M7
21 bit
magnetic absolute encoder, every motor
First, plainly
A research instrument.
Not a medical device.
The PDK is not a certified medical device under any regulatory regime. Use in clinical care, diagnosis, therapy or any regulated medical context is outside what this platform is supplied for, and would require approvals it does not hold. Nothing on this site should be read as a clinical claim.
Development uses
Where motion is the independent variable.
Posture and balance
Scripted perturbations of a seated subject, for studies of trunk, head and postural control.
Multisensory and adaptation
Combine vestibular stimulation with visual, auditory or somatosensory cues; synchronizing with EEG, eye tracking or motion capture is your integration work.
A confound removed mechanically
Subject weight is carried by air, not by a calibration step.
Most motion platforms compensate for subject mass in software. That introduces a per-subject calibration before every session, and it puts a software correction inside the thing you are trying to measure — the delivered motion now depends on how well the compensation was tuned for that person.
On the PDK the static load is carried by pneumatic cylinders under patent CA 3217174 C. A heavier subject changes the air pressure, not the control law.
The motors are not holding the subject up for the duration: the air carries the static load.
Payload is published as up to 250 kg on 1.00 × 1.00 m for the PDK platform, 1.57 m in diameter with the extension feet, on standard mains. Institutional use: contact us.
Keep reading
Academic research
The neighboring page: citability, reproducibility, and verifying our latency figure yourself.
Passive weight compensation
How the load path actually works, and one published claim we refuse to repeat.
Talk to us
For a question a page cannot answer.