Being invisible was one of the handful of things that humans couldn’t achieve with today’s technology.
Researchers have proven that nothing is impossible by creating technology that tricks a person into thinking they’re invisible by using a virtual reality headset, a step that can help those dealing with intense social anxiety, according to the U.K’s The Daily Mail.
“We’re still at a very early stage, but it’s not impossible that, in a decade or two, we might be able to clock macroscopic objects, like a human limb or [an entire] human,” stated Dr. Avid Guterstam, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and co-author of the recent study.
For the study, which was published in the journal Scientific Reports, neuroscientists from Sweden’s Karolinska Institute reportedly asked 125 people to wear a virtual reality headset while standing upright and to look down towards their body.
Instead of seeing their body, the participants were reportedly shown the body of a mannequin or an empty space where their body should have been.
Researchers reportedly stroked the participant’s body with a large paintbrush while moving another paintbrush in the corresponding area in the empty space below the cameras, as if they were touching a body that was invisible.
As part of the study, researchers pretended to threaten the invisible body with a knife, and measured how much the participants’ sweat, according to Live Science. The volunteers were reportedly found to sweat more when they felt that the invisible body was theirs.
At the end of the study, participants were reportedly asked to fill out questionnaires to report how strongly they identified with the invisible body. Researchers reportedly found that when people saw themselves as invisible, their heart rates were lower and reported feeling less anxious as well.
“Having an invisible body seems to have a stress-reducing effect when experiencing socially challenging situations,” Guterstam stated.
