By Jeremy Hsu, LiveScience Senior Writer

Many video gamers know the shock of seeing their game avatar get shot or injured, and so a virtual slap sounds almost tame by comparison. But scientists have now shown how humans can inhabit a virtual body so completely that their real bodies react to a virtual blow as if someone had slapped them in real life.

In the study released this week, male volunteers donned virtual reality goggles and took on the view of a virtual teenage girl sitting in a living room. The virtual girl's mother appeared to stroke her shoulder at the same time a real lab assistant stroked the shoulders of the volunteers.

Suddenly, the virtual mother slapped her daughter about the face three times with accompanying sound effects. The male volunteers all experienced rapid deceleration of their heart rates as a normal bodily response to a threat, because they reacted to the virtual slap as if it were real.

"The experiment reported here is the first that shows that ownership can be transferred to an entirely virtual body, using an experimental design that separates perspective position from visuotactile stimulation," European researchers reported in the journal PLoS One.

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