Animals in Virtual Environments

TL;DR

This paper reviews the use of virtual environments in animal behavior research, highlighting its growing role in biology and engineering, and emphasizing the interdisciplinary potential for advancing fundamental science and technology.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive overview of animal behavior experiments in virtual environments within the XR context, bridging biology and computer science.

Findings

VE are reliable tools for studying animal vision and cognition

Virtual environments facilitate interdisciplinary research

Potential for developing biologically inspired robots and sensors

Abstract

The core idea in an XR (VR/MR/AR) application is to digitally stimulate one or more sensory systems (e.g. visual, auditory, olfactory) of the human user in an interactive way to achieve an immersive experience. Since the early 2000s biologists have been using Virtual Environments (VE) to investigate the mechanisms of behavior in non-human animals including insect, fish, and mammals. VEs have become reliable tools for studying vision, cognition, and sensory-motor control in animals. In turn, the knowledge gained from studying such behaviors can be harnessed by researchers designing biologically inspired robots, smart sensors, and multi-agent artificial intelligence. VE for animals is becoming a widely used application of XR technology but such applications have not previously been reported in the technical literature related to XR. Biologists and computer scientists can benefit greatly from deepening interdisciplinary research in this emerging field and together we can develop new methods for conducting fundamental research in behavioral sciences and engineering. To support our argument we present this review which provides an overview of animal behavior experiments conducted in virtual environments.