First Person Experience of Body Transfer in Virtual Reality

May 14, 2010 | Source: PLoS one

European researchers have used immersive virtual reality in the first experiment to show that body ownership can be transferred to a virtual body.

A first-person perspective of a life-sized virtual human female body that appears to substitute the male subjects’ own bodies was sufficient to generate a body transfer illusion.

The results support the notion that bottom-up perceptual mechanisms can temporarily override top down knowledge, resulting in a radical illusion of transfer of body ownership. The research also illustrates immersive virtual reality as a powerful tool in the study of body representation and experience, since it supports experimental manipulations that would otherwise be infeasible.

Also see: Virtual skirt and legs turn men into girls