What we can learn from immersing mice, fruit flies, and zebrafish in VR

Scientists have created a virtual reality system that allows fruit flies to fly around a virtual pillar, and zebrafish to swim with aliens from the video game Space Invaders. The goal is not to give animals a good time, but for scientists to study how mice, flies, and fish respond to the VR worlds in real time. It’s basically a new tool to study animal behavior in the lab.

The VR system, called FreemoVR, pretty much resembles a holodeck from the TV show Star Trek. It’s an arena surrounded by computer screens that immerses the animals in a virtual world. Researchers tested the system on mice, fruit flies, and zebrafish, and found that the animals reacted to the virtual objects and environments as they would to real ones. The findings were...

Continue reading…