VR Out-Of-Body Experiences

This is cool.

From New Scientist.com: By deliberately scrambling a person's visual and tactile senses, it is now possible to give them an "out-of-body" experience.

Two procedures, which are the first to imitate an out-of-body experience artificially, use cameras to fool people into thinking they are standing or sitting somewhere else in a room. They provide the strongest proof yet that people only imagine floating out of their bodies during surgery or near-death experiences.

"The brain can trick itself, and when it is trying to interpret sensory information, the image it produces doesn't have to be a real representation," says Henrik Ehrsson, of the Institute of Neurology, University College London, UK, who designed the first experiment.

via videosift.com

Tags: Virtual reality, Out-Of-Body Experiences, psychology, the brain