Virtual Reality for Freely Moving Animals

Standard animal behavior paradigms incompletely mimic nature, limiting our understanding of behavior and brain function. Virtual Reality (VR) can help, but poses challenges. Typical VR systems require movement restrictions but disrupt sensorimotor experience, causing neuronal and behavioral alterations. We report the development of FreemoVR, a VR system for freely moving animals. We validate immersive VR for mice, flies and zebrafish. FreemoVR enables new types of experiments by allowing instant, disruption-free environmental reconfigurations and interactions between real organisms and computer-controlled agents. This allows us to establish a height aversion assay in mice and to discover visuomotor effects in Drosophila and zebrafish. Furthermore, photo-realistically mimicking zebrafish, we discovered that effective social influence depends on a prospective leader balancing its internally preferred directional choice with social interaction. FreemoVR technology allows detailed investigations into neural function and behavior by the precise manipulation of sensorimotor feedback loops in unrestrained animals.