People aren’t the only ones getting into the virtual reality craze. Scientists recently broke new ground with a new technology that allows mice to experience VR realistically—and impressively—in the lab.
Researchers at Cornell University have developed the technology, which they have aptly named MouseGoggles. In experiments with mice, mice appeared to respond more clearly to simulated stimuli while wearing glasses. The innovation should make it easier for scientists to conduct animal studies involving VR.
As funny as the concept of rodent VR sounds, there are real applications for it. Ideally, VR could allow scientists to simulate the natural environments of mice under highly controlled conditions. Currently, however, the most commonly used setup is dim, mice are often placed on a treadmill while surrounded by computer or projection screens. These screens cannot cover the mouse’s entire field of view, however, and it can take a long time for animals to react to the VR environment, if at all.
Cornell researchers think their MouseGoggles are a big step up from traditional mouse VR. Rather than trying to make a mini-Oculus Rift from scratch, they built their system using small, low-cost components borrowed from existing smartwatches and other devices. Like other VR systems, mice are placed on a treadmill to use MouseGoggles. Their heads are kept fixed on the mirrors while they are fed the visuals.
“We’ve really got the hacker ethos of taking parts that were built for something else and using them in a new context,” lead scientist Matthew Isaacson, a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell, told the Cornell Chronicle, the university’s news outlet. “The perfect size display, as it turns out, for VR headsets is made for smartwatches. We were lucky that we didn’t have to build or design anything from scratch, we were able to get all the cheap parts we needed.”
To verify the effectiveness of their system, the researchers exposed the mice to various stimuli, all the while measuring their brain activity and observing their behavior. In this series of experiments, the researchers found that the mice seemed to perceive and respond to VR as expected. In one case, for example, they tracked how mice reacted to a slowly approaching black ball that might represent a potential attacker.
“When we tried this kind of testing in a standard VR setup with big screens, the mice didn’t react at all,” Isaacson said. “But almost every mouse, when I see it for the first time through the glasses, jumps. They have a strong panic reaction. They seemed to think they were being attacked by an incoming attacker.”
The team’s findings were published earlier this month in the journal Nature Methods.
The development of virtual reality VR for mice could have all kinds of benefits down the road, researchers say. Accurate VR experiments may allow scientists to better map and understand the brain activity of mice modeled for Alzheimer’s, for example, particularly regions associated with spatial navigation and memory; it may also improve basic research that examines potential treatments for mental disorders.
Issacson and his colleagues are not the only researchers who have recently developed mice for VR systems. But they say theirs is the first to include eye tracking and students. And they’re already building a lightweight, portable VR setup that can be used with large rodents like rats or tree shrews. And they hope to include more improvements in future iterations, such as finding a way to mimic taste and smell.
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