You might think that humans are the only creatures diving into the world of virtual reality, but recent advancements show that mice are joining in on the fun, too. Researchers have unveiled a new piece of technology designed to let lab mice experience VR in a more immersive—and, let’s face it, adorable—way.
This pioneering gadget, known as MouseGoggles, was created at Cornell University. The initial tests demonstrated that, when mice donned these goggles, they had lively and realistic reactions to virtual stimuli. This innovation holds the promise of streamlining VR-based animal experiments for scientists.
Though the concept of mice in VR might sound amusing, it actually opens the door to valuable applications. VR can simulate intricate, natural environments, granting researchers the ability to conduct trials in settings they can control. Currently, traditional setups often involve placing mice on a treadmill surrounded by digital screens. However, these screens fall short of completely immersing the mice due to their limited field of view, and it’s not unusual for the rodents to take a while to react—if they react at all.
The team at Cornell believes that MouseGoggles offers significant improvements over these older methods. Instead of constructing a tiny VR headset from the ground up, they cleverly repurposed small, cost-effective components typically found in smartwatches and other gadgets. Like in other VR experiments, the mice stay on a treadmill to use MouseGoggles, with their heads secured to receive visual cues.
Matthew Isaacson, the lead scientist and a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell, shared his thoughts with the Cornell Chronicle. He mentioned, “This project was guided by a hacker’s mindset—taking existing parts and adapting them to new uses. We found that the perfect display size for a mouse VR headset was already available in smartwatches, which meant we didn’t have to build everything from scratch. We could simply source all the affordable parts we needed.”
To validate their system, the team exposed mice to a variety of stimuli and monitored their brain activity and responses. They discovered that the mice did indeed perceive the virtual reality environment convincingly. In one scenario, they introduced a dark blotch approaching slowly, resembling a potential predator, to see how the mice would respond.
“When using the conventional VR setups with large screens, the mice remained indifferent,” explained Isaacson. “Yet with the goggles, nearly every mouse jolted at the sight of the looming shape. They genuinely appeared to believe a predator was closing in on them.”
This groundbreaking work was featured in the journal Nature Methods earlier this month. The researchers suggest that enhancing VR for mice could revolutionize several areas of research in the future. High-precision VR setups might allow scientists to unlock deeper insights into the brain activity related to spatial memory, especially in mice engineered to mimic conditions like Alzheimer’s. Such systems could also refine early-stage research on therapies for neurological disorders.
Isaacson and his team aren’t alone in their efforts to bring VR to the rodent world, but they’ve set a milestone as the first to integrate eye and pupil tracking in their design. They are already working on a more portable VR model suitable for larger rodents, such as rats and tree shrews, and plan to include further upgrades. Their vision for the future even includes the ability to simulate taste and smell, broadening the horizons of this fascinating intersection between animals and virtual reality.
