Here's What It Feels Like to Be Invisible

Study co-author Zakaryah Abdulkarim (middle) creates the invisible body illusion on a participant (left) wearing a set of head-mounted displays connected to a pair of cameras (right). Credit: Staffan Larsson Recent advances with so-called meta-materials have shown that a practical invisibility cloak might one day be possible. But a new study has approached the scenario from the other direction, asking what it would feel like to be invisible. The answer, it turns out, is it would make us feel more confident. The research was carried out using an extension of the classic rubber-hand illusion. In this experiment, a participant views a dummy hand being stroked with a brush, while also feeling a similar brush stroking their real hand, which is hidden behind a curtain. If the brush-stroking they are viewing on the rubber hand is synchronized with the stokes on their real hand, a powerful illusion can be produced; that the dummy hand is their own hand. A number of interesting variations on this basic experiment have been demonstrated. For instance researchers at Royal Holloway have shown that inducing this sense of ownership of a darker-skinned hand subsequently reduces implicit racial biases in Caucasian participants. A further elaboration of this basic effect uses virtual-reality goggles to change the visual perspective of a participant, so as to induce the sensation that their entire body has been “swapped” with a mannequin, or even another person.