Scientists have made tiny little VR headsets for mice

Scientists have built tiny virtual reality goggles for mice to see how the animals react in different situations.

VR headsets allow us to experience different places and settings without actually having to leave our home environments and now the same can be said for mice.

Researchers at Cornell University made the so-called MouseGoggles with existing components from tech, such as the displays from smart watches.

Testing the mini headsets on mice, they were able to see how the rodents responded to different stimuli.

Using fluorescent tracking, the team was able to make sure the goggles were properly stimulating the brains. The mice walked on a ball-like treadmill.

In one test, the mice were tricked, via the headset, into believing a large and expanding dark blotch was heading for them.

“When we tried this kind of a test in the typical VR setup with big screens, the mice did not react at all,” said Matthew Isaacson, one of the study’s lead authors.

“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.”

Cornell University, Isaacson, M., Chang, H., Berkowitz, L. et al.

The VR headsets have been years in the making with the team gradually building them with a “hacker ethos”.

“It definitely benefited from the hacker ethos of taking parts that are built for something else and then applying it to some new context,” Isaacson explained.

“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.”

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