Dec 15, 2025 20:00:00

The DOOM-playing rat lab reaches a new level, letting rats shoot enemies

DOOM , a pioneering first-person shooter (FPS) game released in 1993, has seen widespread adoption, with many attempting to play it on devices like car navigation systems and receipt printers, in addition to game consoles. Meanwhile, a VR experimental device designed to allow mice to play DOOM has been improved, allowing mice to shoot enemies.

Rats Play Doom
https://ratsplaydoom.com/

Experiment to train rats to play Doom reaches a new level; rats can now shoot enemies — wraparound AMOLED screen provides virtual environment for neuroengineers' expanded open source project | Tom's Hardware
https://www.tomshardware.com/virtual-reality/rats-are-still-being-taught-to-play-doom-now-with-a-curved-amoled-and-a-shoot-button

A VR experimental device for playing DOOM on rats was built by neuroengineer Viktor Toth in 2021. The initial version presented by Toth involved putting a rat in a harness and placing it on a freely rotating ball, with the player moving within DOOM in accordance with the rat's movements.

The schematic diagram of the VR experimental device looks like this: When the rats made the desired movements, they were rewarded with sweet water, which certainly worked, but it wasn't enough to claim that they were playing DOOM.

The project was put on hold for a few years, but electrical engineers

Sandor Makra and Aakhosh Blašek took it on and built a more advanced and modular version 2.

This is what the version 2 built by Macra and his team looks like. It uses a curved display that wraps around the rat's field of vision, providing a much more immersive and consistent visual environment than the previous flat screen. It also sprays air at the tip of the rat's nose when it bumps into a wall, giving it a physical sense of hitting the wall.

A more significant improvement is that the mouse now has a physical trigger mechanism that can be operated with its front paws, allowing the mouse to shoot enemies. This allows the mouse to perform actions essential to FPS games within DOOM.

The hardware configuration and software for the VR experimental device that lets rats play DOOM are available in the following GitHub repository. Researchers around the world can apply this system and use it for various animal experiments.

GitHub - yolorun/rat_vr2: Rat VR 2.0 Software
https://github.com/yolorun/rat_vr2

'DOOM offers a controllable, well-understood 3D world that can be tailored to experimental needs without having to rebuild the game engine from scratch,' said Tom's Hardware, a hardware media company. 'From a scientific perspective, the appeal of this game isn't that it's about rats defeating demons, but rather that it suggests an accessible experimental platform.'