FreemoVR - Virtual Reality for Freely Moving Animals

Press release here:

This page contains material for the press about the paper:

John R Stowers*, Maximilian Hofbauer*, Renaud Bastien, Johannes Griessner⁑, Peter Higgins⁑, Sarfarazhussain Farooqui⁑, Ruth M Fischer, Karin Nowikovsky, Wulf Haubensak, Iain D Couzin, Kristin Tessmar-Raible✎, Andrew D Straw✎. Virtual reality for freely moving animals. Nature Methods 2017 DOI: 10.1038/nmeth.4399 [link] [read online]

* Equal contribution

⁑ Equal contribution

✎ Correspondence to: Kristin Tessmar-Raible kristin.tessmar-raible@univie.ac.at and Andrew D Straw straw@bio.uni-freiburg.de

Images

Credit: https://strawlab.org/freemovr

Download The experimenters control the fly’s position (red circles) and its flight direction by providing strong visual motion stimuli. Left: live camera footage, Right: plot of flight positions.
Credit: https://strawlab.org/freemovr

Download This shows a real fish swimming in a swarm of video game space invaders. This shows the abilities of the system to produce highly artificial visual scenery within an immersive environment.
Credit: IMP/IMBA Graphics Department, https://strawlab.org/freemovr

Download Elevated O-maze assay for VR height aversion exerperiments in mice. The experimenters tested if mice are afraid of virtual heights and found they respond spend most of their time over shallow depths in both VR and real-world conditions.
Credit: IMP/IMBA Graphics Department, https://strawlab.org/freemovr

Download VR arena for freely flying flies.
Credit: IMP/IMBA Graphics Department, https://strawlab.org/freemovr

Download VR arena for freely swimming fish.
Credit: https://strawlab.org/freemovr

Download Elevated O-maze assay for VR height aversion exerperiments in mice. The experimenters tested if mice are afraid of virtual heights and found they respond spend most of their time over shallow depths in both VR and real-world conditions.

Movies

Credit: https://strawlab.org/freemovr

Download The experimenters control the fly’s position (red circles) and its flight direction by providing strong visual motion stimuli. Left: live camera footage, Right: plot of flight positions.
Credit: https://strawlab.org/freemovr

Download This shows a real fish swimming in a swarm of video game space invaders. This shows the abilities of the system to produce highly artificial visual scenery within an immersive environment.
Credit: https://strawlab.org/freemovr

Download This shows a virtual fish interacting with a real fish. The experimenters digitized the appearance and movement patterns of a real fish and thus could create a visually realistic virtual fish, which they then programmed to interact with a real fish.