A Hungarian neurologist who taught rats to play Doom II has expressed interest in broadcasting their ‘gameplay’ on Twitch.
Viktor Tóth created a virtual reality setup for rodents and taught three rats how to play the game by training them to go down a corridor without assistance in the game.
The goal of the research was to develop a virtual reality system that would allow rodents to wander around 3D settings without having to restrain them or undergo any surgical operations.
Tóth claims that mouse VR rigs have been utilized in previous neuroscience investigations, and he expects that his arrangement will make those experiments easier in the future.
Tóth told Futurism that he’d want to attempt streaming the rats’ gaming on Twitch to assist fund and raise awareness for his project. “I think [streaming on Twitch is] a very valid way to monetize a project like this. The only problem is how long the rat can run for”.
Rats have been used extensively in the past for testing, notably in the medical and technological industries. In reality, these small rodents have taught us a great deal. Tóth, on the other hand, claims that the concept to teach rats to play video games never became a huge notion or a research goal.
One of the reasons Tóth chose Doom 2 was because the map was simple to customise, he told Futurism. He claims to have scrapped the first corridor and replaced it with touch-sensitive doors. The rodents were able to approach and open doors by merely tapping them. He also claimed to have created multiple versions of the map with the imp at various locations.
Finally, he chose one of the maps he had created each time the rat began again. The rat wouldn’t only learn to aim at a precise place this way. Instead, it would discover that it had to shoot the Imp, regardless of where it was in the level. If you’ve never played Doom, Imps are one of the game’s most common foes.
Tóth, on the other hand, isn’t stopping at Doom 2. Instead, he claims that in the future, he intends to teach the rats even more games. His initial setup was a little haphazard, but he wants to improve it and put together a better one. He stated his next setup will have numerous displays, and he may even launch a Twitch channel to help fund his studies.