Does anyone notice how he used a trackball mouse design to track their motion in VR?
I feel like there is a clever joke in there somewhere.
Rats in Doom VR
21–30 of 55 posts
Re: Rats in Doom VR
#22They seem to all walk in a straight line. Are they not able to make turns? It’s hard to tell if they’re even perceiving the VR environment or just doing their own thing on the sphere.
From the article: "Although the mechanisms to train left-right turning was present, I did not have time to train movements with turns included, so in most sessions only one axis of motion was registered."
Re: Rats in Doom VR
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect that TFA's author is aware of this, but rats' vision is so poor that I'm not certain VR is the correct modality for them. IIRC they rely on smell, primarily, along with touch, to navigate their environment. I imagine that the rat just decided to accept the likely-ineffective vagaries of the experimental setup, because the smell of food was tantalizingly nearby.
VR has become a pretty popular tool in neuroscience. Rodents can be trained to follow cues shown in VR, or even navigate to specific virtual locations by running on the sphere, so they can certainly perceive something . That said, vision is certainly not their primary sense and the organization of their visual system is...dissimilar from humans and other primates.
Calling it VR sounds like a stretch. I doubt the mouse is experiencing immersion instead of just reacting to some blobs of color on the screen.
Re: Rats in Doom VR
#24That's just mean. Those poor animals how creepy can humans get. Leave them alone.
The rats applied for an internship
Re: Rats in Doom VR
#25That's just mean. Those poor animals how creepy can humans get. Leave them alone.
How is it mean? They get all their needs provided for, two companions, no fear of predators, and every so often they get put out on a ball which dispenses candy when they run.
Re: Rats in Doom VR
#26I'm pretty sure this is exactly how Cave Johnson got started at Aperture Science...
Re: Rats in Doom VR
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
VR has become a pretty popular tool in neuroscience. Rodents can be trained to follow cues shown in VR, or even navigate to specific virtual locations by running on the sphere, so they can certainly perceive something . That said, vision is certainly not their primary sense and the organization of their visual system is...dissimilar from humans and other primates.
Calling it VR sounds like a stretch. I doubt the mouse is experiencing immersion instead of just reacting to some blobs of color on the screen.
Eh, it’s partly marketing, but there are some neat tricks that make it more immersive.
Some groups put the rodent at the center of a translucent hemisphere, then reverse-project the scene onto it. This can completely fill its field of view, and looks pretty good if you get the transform right. It’s also not too hard to make walking on the ball control the camera, so that objects approach faster when the animal runs, or the scene swivels as the animal turns. This article has a few videos of the setup: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00791-w
I doubt the mouse is totally fooled (but neither are you with an Oculus). I think someone has done some cross-over experiments: mazes learned virtually transfer over to physical contraptions and vice versa. Unfortunately, I’m blanking on who might have done this.
Re: Rats in Doom VR
#28Despite all the gloom I am still just a rat playing Doom
then someone will say what is lost, can never be saved.
Re: Rats in Doom VR
#29seems cruel to me.
You would really hate to see the mouse house and depending labs of any research hospital then. The mice here are living a life of luxury by comparison. Yeah, yeah, I know you or someone else will come out against those practices as well; I would love to hear ideas for a replacement or a proposal to just stop science and progress all together.
I don’t have a strong opinion for or against the use of rodents in science, but the tone of your comment was uncalled for, in response to someone simply expressing compassion for a living creature.
Re: Rats in Doom VR
#30seems cruel to me.
You would really hate to see the mouse house and depending labs of any research hospital then. The mice here are living a life of luxury by comparison. Yeah, yeah, I know you or someone else will come out against those practices as well; I would love to hear ideas for a replacement or a proposal to just stop science and progress all together.
But that’s medical research. This is just a hobby project.
It seems completely reasonable to object to using mammals in one’s tech projects, while admitting the value to using animal models to advance medical science.