The designers at Studio diip put together a webcam, an arduino board, a small dc motor and a battery pack to create a robot for their fish to drive. The movement of the fish in the aquarium is tracked by the webcam, sending signals to the microcontroller to direct the vehicle.
The obvious question here is why, and then the obvious answer is that it's a really awesome application for a vision imaging studio to produce. diip - Designing Intelligent Imaging Products - is receiving a lot of attention for the fishbot, the kind of attention and traffic that crashes a modest design studio's website.
http://www.studiodiip.com/news
This application is another step closer to the boxing robots from Real Steel, and an increment past the wave of Kinect makers who have completed sensor-driven bot projects. Combining the vision with robotics and a living creature conjures up images of small cats, dogs, hamsters or lizards all piloting their own vehicles on a cross country road race. A more practical application might be allowing mobility access to a human who has lost use of arms or legs.
Previously the company built applications to suggest menus based on the vegetables placed upon a table, take image data from films and allow viewers to order a similar product, and a card reader for bridge tournaments. All of their vision products and concepts involve a short video demonstration with background music and english subtitles explaining the system.
Mobile aquariums might be the subject of a Kickstarter campaign in the next year - to this point the company has been long on concept work but only pushed the Bridge Card Reader into the marketplace.