PiVR is a system that allows experimenters to immerse small animals into virtual realities. The system tracks the position of the animal and presents light stimulation according to predefined rules, thus creating a virtual landscape in which the animal can behave. By using optogenetics, we have used PiVR to present fruit fly larvae with virtual olfactory realities, adult fruit flies with a virtual gustatory reality and zebrafish larvae with a virtual light gradient. PiVR operates at high temporal resolution (70Hz) with low latencies (<30 milliseconds) while being affordable (<US$500) and easy to build (<6 hours). Through extensive documentation (www.PiVR.org), this tool was designed to be accessible to a wide public, from high school students to professional researchers studying systems neuroscience in academia.

Open-source tools are gaining an increasing foothold in neuroscience. The rising complexity of experiments in systems neuroscience has led to a need for multiple parts of experiments to work together seamlessly. This means that open-source tools that freely interact with each other and can be understood and modified more easily allow scientists to conduct better experiments with less effort than closed tools. Open Ephys is an organization with team members distributed all around the world. Our mission is to advance our understanding of the brain by promoting community ownership of the tools we use to study it. We are making and distributing cutting edge tools that exploit modern technology to bring down the price and complexity of neuroscience experiments. A large component of this is to take tools that were developed in academic labs and helping with documentation, support, and distribution. More recently, we have been working on bringing high-quality manufacturing, distribution, warranty, and support to open source tools by partnering with OEPS in Portugal. We are now also establishing standards that make it possible to combine methods, such as miniaturized microscopes, electrode drive implants, and silicon probes seamlessly in one system. In the longer term, our development of new tools, interfaces and our standardization efforts have the goal of making it possible for scientists to easily run complex experiments that span from complex behaviors and tasks, multiple recording modalities, to easy access to data processing pipelines.