The body-transfer illusion

The video on the body-transfer illusion is short, but the implications will probably stay with you a lot longer, especially if you're on (and into) Second Life, or heavily into avatars. As the New Scientist article which accompanies the video notes, 'previous studies found that giving people virtual-reality avatars that are taller or shorter than they are alters the way they behave.'

Clearly, experimenting with a couple of inches more or less is probably just one of the countless, and not necessarily as benign, ramifications of body-transfer illusions. Think fabricated Facebook selves befriending strangers, perhaps even other fabricated selves; think blurring the boundaries between the real self and the virtual one; think also something much more old-fashioned: weeping over your pop-corn while watching tear-jerkers, and ducking under your seat as hordes of ogres march against the temporarily helpless hero that you so empathise with. And then think that the correlation between make-believe selves and behaviour is not exactly news to the media movers, shakers, and trend-setters; or to advertisers, for that matter. The body-transfer illusion sounds like the 3-D version of something as old as human imagination.