By Jim Rossignol on October 15th, 2009 at 12:39 pm.
This is an outrage! Mice – who scientists believe don’t care about games at all – now have access to a first-person shooter style virtual reality system. Where is our all-encompassing virtual reality kit? We were promised them back in the Nineties and we’re still having to make do with screens, desks and chairs… and sometimes funny goggles. It’s not good enough. You can check out the blatant favouritism towards mice in the video below.
You can tell Jim is outraged, this got posted in the forum three times.
report
I’ll be envious here as soon as I learn to run over a ball like that without falling off.
Can YOU do that?
report
Fools! Don’t they realize that these mice will now become super intelligent and rise up to destroy us? Have bad 90s virtual reality movies taught us nothing?
report
The Lawnmower man? Man that was an awesome movie!
report
Poor mouse. Trying to run away from badly textured walls but not getting anywhere.
report
I laughed at this for far longer than i should have done. xD
report
You mean the…
the…
the mouse ball?
:(((((((((
report
How interesting. I must link to this on facebook as if I’m somehow inately aware of such developments and not just dumbly staring at the web like everyone else.
report
Umm, is it me, or is that maze just really a box, with nowhere for the mouse to go except round and round the perimeter, until it descends into cheese dream madness?
report
That’s what the mice say when they watch us playing the Half Lifes.
report
It seems to me that they are watching the mouse run from cover to cover and analysing it’s propensity to hide under things to avoid being eaten.
report
Exactly my thoughts. They could of at least had the decency of designing a proper maze for the mice.
report
I worry that the mouse cannot fall off the ball BECAUSE IT IS ATTACHED TO THAT CONTRAPTION BY THE HEAD!
Fearsome.
report
Ten years from now, when the technicians who built this experiment are attached to their giant human-balls by the head, forced to run endlessly through a Lynchean nightmare of mobile phones and social networking sites as mousey scientists look on approvingly, they will rue the day.
RUE THE DAY.
report
The scientific world needs to know the answer to a burning question:
Which TF2 class do they prefer?
Is the nippy, evasive Scout just natural to them? Do they prefer the escapist mouse-power-fantasy of a Heavy? Or what?
report
I want to make a pun, but the best I can do is “Demouseman.”
Dammit.
report
That mouse is a spy!
report
And the cheese is a lie?
report
Orange Required, Demouseman was good enough a pun to make me regret reading this in a library and not being able to actually laugh out loud without getting weird stares (which happens, coincidentally, when I play too much TF2 at the library).
report
Hmmm I dunno. That game looks like one that claims to be “sandbox”, but in fact ends up as linear. The graphics are OK I guess, no CryEngine obviously, but that’s to be expected from an indie developer. I’m mostly interesting in the story and character progression anyway.
Anyway, the video is exactly what I like to see from a DEV diary, informative and energetic. Could use some Marilyn Manson chords at the end though.
report
Did you not read the Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy.
Of course mice gets stuff like this first.
report
The question really is, what are our pan-dimensional creators trying to teach us with with experiment?
report
And not a piece of virtual reality cheese in sight.
Evil scientist gits.
report
Sick fucks.
report
If anything made we want to become an animal rights activist it was this. Poor mouse! It seems to be trapped in a box with no-where to go! How must that make it feel? Worst of all is that plodding pace at which it turns. It must take several seconds to turn 180 degrees.
report
I love RPS to death but i have to agree this is fucking sick :( Why can’t we learn to treat other animals with respect?!
report
“It seems to be trapped in a box with no-where to go! How must that make it feel?”
Like every. single. office worker. on earth.
report
Eh, speaking as someone that works with animal models, if what is going on here makes you sick, you do NOT want to know what happens in medical research.
report
So, mice are cover-whores. Do rabbits bunny-hop? We need to test the whole animal kingdom!
report
Don’t forget they are getting their own robots too!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QPiF4-iu6g
Damn mice have it better than I do.
report
So next time you log on to World of Warcraft, beware that Man of Magic you’ve been fighting could be a mouse in disguise.
report
I would 1v1 that mouse
report
totally.
report
If I were a mouse I would definitely play… wait for it… Py-rodent.
report
Will someone please give the poor mouse a shotgun? Or a crowbar, at least.
report
Ladies and gentlemen, we are overlooking one important detail.
The co-author of this study…
He is called Professor Tank.
report
I could take that mouse easily.
Unless it has a medic.
Then the medic dies first & the mouse gets it when I respawn. Damn mice & their permanently attached medics. Who do they think they are?
report
First mice get ears on their backs before us, now this!
Too much! Also, this really looks like some kind of sick inescapable nightmare-world.
Also also, it’s not really clear the mouse is actually ‘playing’ what hes seeing there. He seems to be attached to the machine by some kind of firm grip on his tiny head, and his feet are probably only moving so fast because hes trying to climb up on top of that ball, a task he CANNOT ACHIEVE. In fact, seeing as he cant fall off without his mousey skull breaking, and he can’t climb up, life must be pretty hard for him.
report
Except that if the mouse weren’t actually “playing” the game, he would just run to escape and noclip through a wall.
Evidently, mice are our betters — when faced with an unwinnable game, they just keep on playing rather than resorting to cheat codes.
report
Yeah, I find it pretty horrifying!
report
Yo dawg, I hear that you PC types like mouses, so we have put a mouse on a giganteous trackball in a “boxmap”… in second life 1992 graphics.
report
I demand we put mice in giant farms and use them to power the proper TF2 bots we so desire.
Also, could we use these mice linked to machines to explore planets? Put a craft in orbit, full of mice, and then launch the virtual mice machines onto the ground to do explore while begin controlled by the orbiting mice.
report
Erm. It’s a mouse trying to scramble up on top of a sphere—given how it’s going round in circles from trying to climb at the same angle, there’s no real evidence there that it’s reacting to the environment at all. Give it long enough, and it may well drift its circle enough that it does noclip right through the wall.
report
They probably tested the mouse reactions to the ball first before hooking a computer up to that. We do not know that, so therefore i think its kinda rough to judge on the lack of good research.
Interesting, now we know he responds to something, it would be far more interesting to try and capture the mice’s brainwaves and see what happends then.
report
Of course, perhaps it’s just trying to practice its circlestrafing, but is compounded by in an inability to move in a direction perpendicular to that it’s facing.
report
Are you insulting the honor of James Tiberius Kirk, good sir?
Fie on the notion!
report
Mice are rocket camping bitches.
report
“Where is our all-encompassing virtual reality kit?”
It’s on a recent episode of House. Do you Brits watch House? It’d be silly it we were able to import Hugh Laurie from you guys, without exporting his show back to you.
Anyway, your all-encompassing virtual reality kit is running late, because the developer was very sick.
report
Indeed we do. The current series running on Sky is about two episodes in. He’s just been let out of the nut house.
report
It’s that second one, entitled “Epic Fail”, that I was referencing.
report
look out, it’s got a rocket-launcher!
report
It doesn’t look like the mouse is reacting to the “environment” much. He’s just climbing in a mostly straight line (straight for him, the computer thinks he’s turning) and occasionally pausing to consider whether he’ll ever get his head out of that vice.
VR would probably need to get a lot less intrusive and uncomfortable to properly fool an animal. They don’t go for the willing suspension of disbelief so easily.
report
Of Mice and Medics?
report
I’m quite impressed at the speed at which this has circulated round the interwebs, given that I only heard about it from Nature today. The most amusing thing is that they were using the game to see how the mouse reacts to things that can’t happen in the real world, like teleportation, or looping worlds… It’s only a matter of time before they learn how to telefrag…
report
I wonder how they stimulate the mouse ?
report
Poor space mouse, Trapped in
an existence of poor game
design.Will find cheese?
report
I was just waiting for Imps and Cacodemons to attack the mouse.
Unfortunately, it wouldn´t stand a chance, needs to learn strafing first. :-)
report
Possibly they want to train mice so then they can give them weapons and create an army or mutant mice with an ear in the back and phosphorescent body.
I would like to play Quake Live online against those mice anyway.
report
Ooh those Evil Cat Scientists are MEAN!
*sniggering behind their paws*
“Run you little bastard. Run!”
“Graham can you pass me that clipboard, ooh and another custard cream”
report
For those of you claiming that the mouse is just running straight: There are two moments in which the mouse draws near to the “wall” and stops for a moment to adjust the angle at which it’s moving. Additionally, the mouse is running in circles because each time it runs under a “cylinder” it gets a small taste of water. It’s a simple conditioned response experiment, but I think the maze design is not very good.
report
that mouse ball needs more traction, you can see his little feet slipping.
report
Humans are slowing getting there. Our equivalent of the mouse ball can be seen here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rtX2pWRh6w
report
They must teach that mouse how to grind and level up in World of Warcraft. One of those would be cheaper than paying a Korean guy to play the game 14 hours a day.
report
Someone should make a TF2 mod to make all the characters mice :)
report
This has nothing to do with science but with Corporate America coming up with a way to defeat the economic crisis, by expanding the market base. Of course, the first commercial use for this technology will be rodent porn.
report
So how long until they turn this into a murder simulator? And how long until people complain about mice playing murder simulators?
report
If mice didn’t want to be experimented on then they should have evolved mounted rockets and laser beams faster.
report
@pepper, except that is exactly what they did, and showed the signals from the brain are very similar to signals you see when a mouse is actually walking around. And in fact were able to measure those signals in a new way that was impossible before, and learn something about how they worked. That’s what makes it a nature article rather than just some stupid youtube video.
report
I made a virtual reality setup to work with any pc game :)
Chex it out, you could be as cool as a mouse!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CoJOHuKy28
report