If you stopped by Vulintus’ booth last year at SfN 2024, hopefully we showed you our new Spherical Treadmill for mice that we were debuting at the conference. We’re still pretty excited about it, but we’ll admit that our software at the time was pretty boring, just recording and displaying the animal’s walking path as a simple line. So this week we just wrapped up some new software updates focused on real-time displays of the treadmill ball rotation and the animal’s current orientation in virtual space.

In addition to the new displays, we also made some updates under the hood, making it easier to integrate the spherical treadmill walking/running path recordings with other Vulintus products through the OmniTrak Controller, including our liquid dispensers, pellet dispensers, touch sensors, or lick sensors. We also added TTL inputs and outputs so you can synchronize with other brands’ optogenetic or electrophysiology systems.

We’re already planning our next set of software/firmware updates, including adding HID (Human Interface Device) capability, so that you can set up the spherical treadmill like a video game controller to interact with your virtual reality system. Let us know if there’s any other new software functionality you’d like to see us build in. Also, stay tuned for some new sphere-size options on the hardware side! We haven’t forgotten about all of you Bug Nerds that asked if we had one of these for your insect model!