Virtual reality avatars created
Scientists have been able to transmit the minds of volunteers from their corporeal bodies to custom virtual reality avatars for the first time.
The technique, dramatised in James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar, now looks set to make the leap to real reality with the technology predicted to be employed in fields as diverse as computer games and transport.
The experiment saw a group of volunteers given a digital body and the freedom to move around a VR environment in a bid to elicit how the brain correlates sensory information.
In the tests Olaf Blanke, a neurologist at the Swiss Brain Mind Institute, gave volunteers skullcaps which contained electrodes to monitor brain activity, whilst they wore a set of goggles which showed them a different body in a different world.
They were subsequently poked and prodded by researchers to see how out of sync their brains had become with their abandoned cadavers.
Blanke said of his guinea pigs: “They started thinking that the avatar was their own body. We created a partial out-of-body experience. We were able to disassociate touch and vision and make people think that their body was two metres in front of them."