Virtual reality illusions: the medical and scientific benefits

Is it possible to have the illusion that your body has changed radically, or that a different body is your body?. Mel Slater, Professor of Virtual Environments at UCL Computer Science, describes the findings and scientific applications of research he has conducted into the phenomenon of 'body transfer' in virtual reality, published today in PLoS ONE . ?This question is an important one for scientists since it addresses a critical part of how our brain works, how does it distinguish between what is and what is not part of our body. From common sense the answer would seem to be 'no', since our body is apparently something constant, that changes only slowly, with age, diet and physical exercise. In our article published today, my colleagues and I show that it is possible to give people the illusion that their whole body had changed using virtual reality. In our experiment, 24 men put on a head-mounted display, which placed them in a virtual room where they saw two virtual people: an older woman who was standing and stroking the arm of a seated young girl. After observing this scene for a few minutes, the viewpoint of the men was transferred to that of the virtual girl: when they looked down at themselves they would see in virtual reality that their body had been substituted by the virtual body of the girl.