Researchers Put Rats on a VR Treadmill to “Play” DOOM

A team has built a rodent-scale VR rig that lets rats navigate simplified DOOM levels, translating treadmill movement and a “fire” trigger into in-game actions with reward-driven training. What’s notable here isn’t the meme-rodent VR has been around-but the decision to co-opt a mature, deterministic game engine as the experimental arena. That swaps bespoke lab mazes for standardized, replayable environments with rich visuals, event logs, and crisp performance metrics. In other words: fewer custom rigs, more comparable data.

Under the hood, the setup is familiar to neuroscience labs: a head-fixed rat runs on a spherical treadmill tracked by optical sensors, faces a screen, and receives rewards for hitting task objectives; a separate lick or nose-poke maps to shooting. Levels are pared down to forward motion, turning, and a simple target, aligning the task with operant conditioning rather than human-style “gameplay.” The bigger picture is methodological. Using off-the-shelf engines like DOOM lowers friction for building, sharing, and reproducing complex spatial tasks, and bridges behavioral experiments with tooling long used in simulation and reinforcement learning. Worth noting: this doesn’t imply rats “understand” DOOM; the achievement is a clean interface between standardized software environments and animal behavior, which is precisely where experimental throughput and rigor often bottleneck.