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• Posted December 26, 2024

Mice Headsets Make it Easier to Study Brain Response to Virtual Realty

Virtual reality headsets like the Meta Quest or Apple Vision Pro will be a Christmas gift in more than one home this year.

Now mice are getting in on the action.

Researchers have developed a set of VR goggles for lab mice for use in brain studies, according to a report published recently in the journal Nature Methods.

These VR goggles will allow scientists to provide immersive experiences for the mice, while capturing fluorescent images of the rodents’ brain activity.

The goggles -- which dwarf the tiny mice in size -- were built using low-cost, off-the-shelf components like smartwatch displays and tiny lenses, researchers said.

“It definitely benefited from the hacker ethos of taking parts that are built for something else and then applying it to some new context,” co-lead investigator Matthew Isaacson, a post-doctoral researcher at Cornell University, said in a news release from the college.

“The perfect size display, as it turns out, for a mouse VR headset is pretty much already made for smart watches,” Isaacson continued. “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.”

Mice are frequently used in studies of brain activity.

About a decade ago, researchers began rigging up clunky projector screens for mice as a means of creating virtual reality environments, but these devices frequently created so much light and noise that they spoiled experiments, researchers said.

“The more immersive we can make that behavioral task, the more naturalistic of a brain function we’re going to be studying,” senior researcher Chris Schaffer, a professor of biomedical engineering at Cornell, said in a news release.

The new VR setup, called MouseGoggles, requires a mouse to stand on a ball-shaped treadmill with its head fixed in place. The headset is attached to its head and held in place with a rod while the mouse skitters about on the treadmill.

To see if the headset worked, researchers projected the image of an expanding dark blotch that appeared to be approaching the mice.

“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 researchers also examined two key brain regions to make sure the VR images were working properly.

Results from the primary visual cortex confirmed that the goggles form sharp, high-contrast images that mice can see, and readings from the hippocampus confirmed that mice are successfully mapping the virtual environment provided them.

These VR goggles could be used to help study brain activity that occurs as mammals -- be they mice or men -- move around their environment, potentially giving researchers new insights into disorders like Alzheimer’s disease, the study’s authors said.

Researchers plan to further develop the goggles, including a lightweight mobile version that could be worn around by larger lab rodents like rats. They also want to see if they can incorporate more senses into the VR experience, like taste and smell.

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

More information

The University of Texas at Austin has more on VR headsets and brain research.

SOURCE: Cornell University, news release, Dec. 18, 2024