In 2020, Hungarian software engineer and neuroscientist Viktor Tóth came up with a fascinating experiment. With the use of a bootstrap experimental setup consisting of a large polystyrene ball, a curved computer monitor, and a small straw that dispenses sugar water, Tóth managed to teach a rat how to play the classic 1994 video game Doom II.
The rat’s movements translated into rotations of the ball, which were then translated into movement inside the iconic first-person shooter. The sugar water served as a treat whenever the rat completed a milestone, like walking down a corridor.
Half a decade later, Tóth’s setup has received a major upgrade, giving the daring demon-slaying rats an entirely newfound level of immersion. That’s in large part thanks to a small, foldable AMOLED screen that stretches across 180 degrees of the rat’s vision — and a plethora of custom, 3D printed parts.
An image Tóth and his collaborators — electrical engineer Sándor Makra and student Ákos Blaschek — shared on the project’s website, ratsplaydoom.com, shows a black and white rat cowering on the ball while staring at a VR goggles-like screen warped around most of its head that “maximizes immersion without obstructing whisker space.”
Best of all, the V2 system now allows the rats to shoot at demons in the video game thanks to a “custom-built hand-operated lever” which the rodents can pull “with their paws to fire.”
After the major upgrade, the rats “successfully learned to navigate the virtual environment and trigger the shooting mechanism,” according to the project’s website. “Habituation took approximately two weeks per rat.”
To simulate the rat plowing into walls inside the video game, the team even installed two small air nozzles to deliver “targeted air puffs on command.”
In case you were wondering at this point why they’re doing all of this, there unfortunately isn’t a clear answer. For one, this strictly isn’t an advanced brain computer interface (BCI) experiment that involves scanning the rat’s brain waves.
“The idea just came out of basically nowhere,” Tóth told Futurism back in 2021. “I was just like, ‘Why not?’”
Nonetheless, he argued that the experiment is “very relevant” to BCIs, a space he’s “trying to get into in the long run.”
As for why he chose Doom II specifically, Tóth told Futurism at the time that the game has a “very easy to edit map” that can be modified for the rats to take on.
For now, he acknowledges, the rats still have a lot of learning to do before they can take on the game’s single-player campaign.
“While advanced training wasn’t completed due to time constraints, initial data showed promising engagement with the system,” the website notes.
However, the rats may need a break every once in a while, as the “impact of prolonged VR exposure on rat well-being needs further research.”
More on the experiment: Scientist Who Trained Rats to Play “Doom II” Says He May Start Twitch Channel
The post Rats Successfully Trained to Shoot Demons in “Doom” appeared first on Futurism.
