By Bruce Bower
Virtual reality can get downright unreal. In this simulated realm, grown men given a new perspective on the world suddenly find themselves convinced that they inhabit the body of a young girl.
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Guys who spend time looking at a simulated world through a life-size virtual girl’s eyes feel as if they reside in her body when they then view her from a third-person perspective, say cognitive scientist Mel Slater of University of Barcelona and his colleagues.
This illusion derives from a real-world expectation that a person who looks down will see his or her own body, the researchers propose in a paper published online May 12 in PLoS ONE. In the experiment, men wearing virtual-reality headsets gazed down to see a girl’s body, first at ground level and then from above.