Scientists Created VR Glasses for Mice and They’re Adorable: ScienceAlert

Scientists at Cornell University have created mini virtual reality headsets for mice. These MouseGoggles don’t just help creatures relax after a long day in the lab; they offer researchers insight into their behavior and brain functions.

A mouse wearing a small VR headset is an adorable mental image, but the whole thing lacks the mobility of our own face-mounted glasses. Instead, the MouseGoggles are held in place on scaffolding, sporting two smartwatch screens behind a pair of Fresnel lenses, featuring technology that tracks the animals’ eye movements and pupil dilation.

The mice quickly learned to navigate their virtual environment by running on a spherical treadmill. And these visuals seemed more immersive than ever: Viewed through the MouseGoggles, mice responded to reward and fear stimuli much more strongly than when viewing virtual worlds on large 360-degree projection screens.

But it’s not all fun and games. By making virtual reality more realistic for mice, scientists can more precisely monitor brain activity associated with spatial navigation and memory.

If you’ve ever worn a VR headset, you’ll know that it feels more immersive than watching something on the big screen. According to the new Cornell study, it appears that even mice feel this way.

Previous attempts to test animals in virtual environments involved placing them in the center of circular screens, with visuals projected onto the walls. Even though the mice learned to navigate by running on a spherical treadmill, what they saw was apparently less convincing.

The researchers tested mice with MouseGoggles and traditional on-screen VR systems with an “imminent stimulus.”

A dark blob quickly expanded across their field of vision, simulating the approach of a predator. The mice not only jumped and arched their backs, but also slowed their walking speed, shifted their gaze and dilated their pupils.

“When we tried this type of test in a typical VR setup with large screens, the mice didn’t react at all,” says neuroscientist Matthew Isaacson, lead author of the study.

“But almost all mice, the first time they see them with the glasses, they jump. They have a huge startle reaction. They really seemed to think they were being attacked by an imminent predator.”

In more enjoyable experiments for the subjects, the team trained mice on a looping linear VR track where they received liquid rewards for licking at a certain location. On the fourth or fifth day, they received no reward, but they still licked in the same spot in anticipation of a treat and slowed down their “exploratory licking” outside of the reward areas.

These results indicate that the MouseGoggles configuration could still enable spatial learning in mice.

The ultimate goal isn’t just to provide better VR gaming experiences: more precise simulations allow scientists to test the neurological responses of mice in a wider variety of situations than would otherwise be possible in the lab. As near-experiments show, projection-based virtual reality simply isn’t believable enough for mice.

“The more immersive we can make this behavioral task, the more naturalistic the brain function we will study will be,” says biomedical engineer Chris Schaffer.

MouseGoogles design is also cheaper and allows for additional features like eye tracking.

Next steps, the team says, are developing wearable versions for other animals, and even integrating other senses into the experience.

“I think five-sense virtual reality for mice is a direction to go for experiments, where we’re trying to understand these very complicated behaviors, where mice are integrating sensory information, comparing desirability with motivational states internal, such as the need for rest and food, and then making decisions about how to behave,” says Schaffer.

The research was published in the journal Natural methods.