A team from the Schaffer-Nishimura Lab at Cornell University has stepped up their neuroscience and behaviour research with mouseVRheadset — a teeny VR headset. For mice.
Render of the entire enclosure in use by mouse subject (right)
How does it work?
A Raspberry Pi 4 runs the Godot video game engine inside the headset, and the mice view the output through a dual-SPI display. Researchers created virtual scenes in Godot to test the ability of mice in various scenarios, such as avoiding VR cliffs and reacting to looming objects of various sizes coming towards them at different speeds.
Two circular display eyepieces, each covered with a Fresnel lens to provide a wide field of view, are mounted onto the Raspberry Pi. I Googled “Fresnel lens” for you and turns out it’s actually an interesting story. French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel developed the composite compact lens for use in lighthouses and it became known as “the invention that saved a million ships”. It’s these Fresnel lenses which create a fully immersive experience for the mice.
A custom 3D-printed case houses all the hardware, with additional pieces designed to angle the eye displays inwards to better fit a mouse-sized field of view.
Navigating virtual worlds
The mice are on a mini treadmill while they use the VR headset. Their movement on the treadmill controls their navigation of the virtual worlds they experience inside Godot. Optical sensors working with an Arduino Due microcontroller measure treadmill motion; the Arduino sends the motion data to the Raspberry Pi, then the Godot game engine alters the VR scene according to the detected mouse movements.
Help the research team
The research team invites bug and issue reports, and you can also start a discussion if you have ideas as to how they can improve this work in progress. If you’d like to deep-dive into the construction of the headset, the treadmill, or the software behind this project, check out the research team’s GitHub.
