Category: virtual reality

Men become little girls in real life VR Experiment

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

AFK Series (spoilers!)

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Short Review

Love it! Go watch it right now! https://www.afkwebseries.com/home

Longer Review

AFK starts with the premise that a bunch of people who play an online role-playing game find themselves trapped in the game as their avatars. This, happily, leads to a lot of fun gender exploration that goes a little beyond the things we’ve seen before (TWSB).

In the world of the familiar, we do have a womanizing bro who finds himself trapped as a petite Asian “warrior princess” initially wearing a chain mail bikini. The actress who plays “him” does a great job depicting a guy in a naturalistic way, and the character is well-written– hiding his former gender out of shame, struggling to deal with male attention and sexual assault.

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In addition, we have the less common female trapped as a male– and though she is not explored as fully, there are some very fun scenes dealing with her discomfort over having male anatomy.

Most interesting of all, though, is a character who refuses to reveal their real world biological gender, telling anyone who asks “none of your business.” This character does the most to challenge gender steretypes because it is very hard to guess what her identity is– in the game she is biologically female, but her attitude and mannerisms could belong to either a man of a woman– which is true in real life of many people. So, I find her the most fascinating.

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The show is on a budget, but the love and care of the whole crew is evident in the work. In addition, if you have ever played a MORPG, the show is full of really fun little jokes about the gamer life and the culture inside these games. The identity explorations even getting into people discovering there are multiple versions of themselves inside the game (in the form of their other accounts.)

You can watch all episodes online! https://www.afkwebseries.com/home