Virtual reality, Swedish style
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Media outlets across the world were fascinated on Wednesday with an experiment from the Karolinska Institutet on Wednesday which reads like something out of a science fiction movie.
As Reuters puts it:
Researchers using closed-circuit televisions to create an illusion have made volunteers virtually swap bodies, even making women believe they were in a man’s body and vice-versa.
The experiment … shows it is possible to manipulate the human mind to create the perception of having another body …
Or, as the researchers put it in their article, published on Tuesday in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE:
Manipulation of the visual perspective, in combination with the receipt of correlated multisensory information from the body was sufficient to trigger the illusion that another person’s body or an artificial body was one’s own. This effect was so strong that people could experience being in another person’s body when facing their own body and shaking hands with it.
All philosophizing aside, the experiment also showed that there were limits to the extent which the subjects sensed that they were outside their own bodies.
The illusion only goes so far. The researchers said they could not fool their volunteers into thinking they were a box, for example.
Virtual reality indeed. One can only imagine where this sort of technology may lead in the future.
