[mattkrause]

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.

[goodpoint]

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.

[mattkrause]

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.