Brain is the most complex and least studied organ in the body. Answers to questions spanning from the inner workings of consciousness to how to contain the upcoming rise of mental and neurodegenerative diseases critically depend on our ability to gather diverse anatomical, functional, metabolic and molecular information from the brain at multiple spatial and temporal scales. Efforts to scale neuroimaging towards the direct visualization of mammalian brain-wide neuronal activity have so far faced major challenges. Although high-resolution optical imaging of the whole brain in small animals has been achieved ex vivo, the realtime and direct monitoring of large-scale neuronal activity remains difficult, owing to the performance gap between localized, largely invasive, optical microscopy of rapid, cellular-resolved neuronal activity and whole-brain macroscopy of slow hemodynamics and metabolism. The OPTOACOUSTOGENETICS project was aimed at developing a new generation functional imaging technology that can perform rapid non-invasive volumetric imaging of neural activity across the entire rodent brain.