Researchers have built miniature virtual reality goggles for mice to better understand the rodent’s brain activity and gain more insight into disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease.
Study lead author Matthew Isaacson, a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University in the United States, said thanks to their genetic makeup and ability to navigate mazes mice had long been a go-to model for behavioural and neurological studies.
Mr Isaacson said in recent years experiments with mice had entered virtual reality and the new miniature VR headsets would help to immerse them more deeply in it.
He said the technology had the potential to help reveal the neural activity that informed spatial navigation and memory function, giving researchers new insights into disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and its potential treatments.
“The MouseGoggles were created using low-cost, off-the-shelf components, such as smartwatch displays and tiny lenses, and offer visual stimulation over a wide field of view while tracking the mouse’s eye movements and changes in pupil size.
“It’s a rare opportunity, when building tools, that you can make something that is experimentally much more powerful than current technology, and that is also simpler and cheaper to build.”
Mr Isaacson said it brought more experimental power to neuroscience and it was a much more accessible version of the technology, so it could be used by a lot more labs.
He said many of the components he needed, such as tiny displays and tiny lenses, were already commercially available.
“It definitely benefited from the hacker ethos of taking parts that are built for something else and then applying it to some new context.
“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.”
Mr Isaacson said the goggles weren’t wearable in the traditional sense as a mouse stands on a treadmill, with its head fixed in place, as it peers into a pair of eye pieces.
He said the mouse’s neural activity patterns can then be fluorescently imaged.
Read the full study: MouseGoggles: an immersive virtual reality headset for mouse neuroscience and behavior.
