Scientists Built Tiny VR Goggles for Mice

People are not the only ones who are interested in knowing the real facts. Scientists have just released a new technology that allows mice to have a realistic – and fun – experience with VR in the lab.

Researchers at Cornell University developed the technology, which they aptly named MouseGoggles. In experiments with mice, the rats appeared to respond more clearly to the actions they performed while wearing the glasses. These innovations should make it easier for scientists to conduct VR-based animal studies.

Funny as the concept of rodent VR sounds, there are real uses for it. Ideally, VR could allow scientists to mimic the environment of mice under controlled conditions. Currently, the most common setups are visual, and mice are often placed on a treadmill surrounded by computers or monitors. These displays can’t cover the entire surface area of ​​the mouse, however, and it can take a long time for the animals to adapt to the VR environment, if at all.

Cornell researchers think their MouseGoggles are a big step up from the usual VR mouse. Instead of trying to build a mini-Oculus Rift from scratch, they built their system using small, inexpensive components borrowed from smartwatches and other devices that already existed. Like other VR systems, mice are placed on a treadmill to operate the MouseGoggles. Their heads are fixed on mirrors as they are fed visual stimuli.

“It really benefited from the nature of hackers to take parts that are built for something and use them for new things,” lead scientist Matthew Isaacson, a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell, said. he said The Cornell Chronicle, the university’s newspaper. “The best display, as it turns out, is that the VR headset has already been designed for smart watches. We were lucky that we didn’t have to design or build anything from scratch, we could get all the cheap hardware we needed.”

In order to confirm that their system works, the researchers exposed the mice to various stimuli, each time measuring their brain activity and observing their reactions. In a series of tests, the researchers found that the mice seemed to see and respond to VR as expected. For example, at one time, they were investigating how the mice reacted to a black scar that could represent a beast.

“When we ran this type of test on a VR setup with a large screen, the mice didn’t do it at all,” Isaacson said. “But almost every mouse, when they see it for the first time with glasses, they jump. They have a great interest. They seemed to think that they were being attacked by a beast that was coming.”

The team’s results were printed earlier this month in the journal Nature Methods.

The development of virtual reality VR for mice could have all kinds of benefits, the researchers say. Accurate VR experiments can allow scientists to better map and understand how the brains of mice develop Alzheimer’s disease, for example, the areas associated with central processing and memory; It can also improve research studies that test potential treatments for brain diseases.

Issacson and his colleagues are not the only researchers involved in the near future VR mouse systems. But they say theirs is the first to incorporate eye tracking with children. And they are already developing a lightweight VR system that can be used with large rodents like rats or tree shrews. They also hope to include more upgrades in the future, such as finding a way to target taste and smell.