They seem to all walk in a straight line. Are they not able to make turns? It’s hard to tell if they’re even perceiving the VR environment or just doing their own thing on the sphere.
A paper found that in order to prevent rats cheating the floor needed to have sand to prevent them picking up on vibrations. The result should've been that experiments began incorporating this measure in their own setups, but instead the paper went ignored
The paper: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1939-01955-001
Amusingly this VR direction could also be a useful method to limit the rat's perceptions to the experiment. But first it'd need to have the rat trained to explore a 3d environment & be fed by collecting food in the 3d environment
Run a filter for a situation and a query against a behavioural database at Amazon, Google, FB and you can build quite a nice insight into humanity.
Papers published with largest knowledge on humanity on earth : 0
Instead, the point is that a good scientist has to aggressively consider possible explanations for your data and possible experimental confounds. This is much, much harder when studying subjects that have some agency of their own, like rats or humans.
For all the attempts to measure stuff and be "scientific", businesses mostly run on gut feelings, even when they're doing "experiments" or "collecting data in order to make informed decisions" or whatever. Often it's really easy to spot problems with these processes, but no-one cares as long as the PowerPoint slides say what they want them to say and pretend to be backed by data.
I've seen this described as "decision-based evidence-making".
Rodents can be trained to follow cues shown in VR, or even navigate to specific virtual locations by running on the sphere, so they can certainly perceive something.
That said, vision is certainly not their primary sense and the organization of their visual system is...dissimilar from humans and other primates.
Some groups put the rodent at the center of a translucent hemisphere, then reverse-project the scene onto it. This can completely fill its field of view, and looks pretty good if you get the transform right. It’s also not too hard to make walking on the ball control the camera, so that objects approach faster when the animal runs, or the scene swivels as the animal turns. This article has a few videos of the setup: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00791-w
I doubt the mouse is totally fooled (but neither are you with an Oculus). I think someone has done some cross-over experiments: mazes learned virtually transfer over to physical contraptions and vice versa. Unfortunately, I’m blanking on who might have done this.