Humans aren’t the only ones getting in on the virtual reality craze. Scientists have just debuted a new technology that allows mice to more realistically—and adorably—experience VR in the lab.
Researchers at Cornell University developed the tech, which they’ve aptly named MouseGoggles. In experiments with mice, the rodents appeared to vividly respond to simulated stimuli while wearing the goggles. The innovation should make it easier for scientists to run animal studies involving VR.
As funny as the idea of rodent VR sounds, there are actual applications for it. Ideally, VR can allow scientists to simulate naturalistic environments for mice under more controlled conditions. Right now, though, the most commonly used set-ups are pretty clunky, with mice often being placed onto a treadmill while they’re surrounded by computer or projection screens. These screens can’t cover a mouse’s entire field of view, however, and it can take a long time for the animals to react to the VR environment, if they ever do at all.
The Cornell researchers think that their MouseGoggles are a substantial step up from standard mice VR. Rather than trying to create a mini-Oculus Rift from scratch, they built their system using tiny, low-cost parts borrowed from smartwatches and other existing devices. Like other VR systems, the mice are placed onto a treadmill to use the MouseGoggles. Their heads are kept fixed to the goggles while they’re fed visual stimuli.
“It definitely benefited from the hacker ethos of taking parts that are built for something else and then applying it to some new context,” lead scientist Matthew Isaacson, a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell, told the Cornell Chronicle, an university news outlet. “The perfect size display, as it turns out, for a mouse VR headset is pretty much already made for smart watches. We were lucky that we didn’t need to build or design anything from scratch, we could easily source all the inexpensive parts we needed.”
To confirm the viability of their system, the researchers exposed the mice to various stimuli, all the while measuring their brain activity and observing their behavior. Across a series of tests, the researchers found that the mice truly did seem to see and respond to the VR as hoped. In one condition, for instance, they tracked how the mice reacted to a gradually approaching dark blotch that could have represented a potential predator.
“When we tried this kind of a test in the typical VR setup with big screens, the mice did not react at all,” Isaacson said. “But almost every single mouse, the first time they see it with the goggles, they jump. They have a huge startle reaction. They really did seem to think they were getting attacked by a looming predator.”
The team’s findings were published earlier this month in the journal Nature Methods.
The development of more realistic VR for mice could have all sorts of benefits down the road, the researchers say. Accurate VR experiments might allow scientists to better map and understand the brain activity of mice modeled to have Alzheimer’s, for instance, particularly the regions tied to spatial navigation and memory; it might also improve basic research studies testing out potential treatments for brain disorders.
Issacson and his colleagues aren’t the only researchers who have recently created VR systems for mice. But they say theirs is the first to incorporate tracking of the eyes and pupils. And they’re already developing a lightweight, mobile VR set-up that could be used with larger rodents like rats or tree shrews. They’re also hoping to include more upgrades in a future iteration, such as finding a way to simulate taste and smell.
