Just thought I would share an interesting experiment I stumbled upon today. It involves males being body swapped with a little girl in Virtual Reality. This is a real life experiment.

The study had 24 male participants enter virtual reality. On the other side of the room from where they first entered were a woman and a little girl. After some time, some of the males were transferred into the first person POV of the little girl. Others were still in a third person POV. Then, after some more time, the women slaps the little girl in the face.

The researchers were monitoring bodily functions and the result suggested that the males who’d been transferred into the little girl POV had taken ownership of the little girl body and reacted as if they had been slapped in the face.

I may just find a way to work this into a story one day. I also saw a study where they had people touch their own face while looking in a virtual mirror at a different face, and the researchers found that it caused their brains to start identifying the new face as their own.

Just sort of an interesting thing to me, and thank you to the researchers for setting up an age and gender swap VR experience. Wish I could have been in the room when they were coming up with this. I would love to see more of these kinds of studies. Here’s a screen shot that shows some of the virtual world from the study.

The authors are as follows and their article about the study is online. It’s actually quite old– 2009.

Mel Slater, Bernhard Spanlang, Maria V. Sanchez-Vives, Olaf Blanke