A volunteer undregoes a virtual sex change. His virtual reality headset was showing him a woman and a young girl in a room and transport him into the girl's body. Once there the woman strokes his arm while his real arm is being stroked at the same time. The research aims to reveal how much we're prepared to believe that the virtual is real, according to university of Barcelona's, Panha Spindly .

What we're doing this research with reality is that we show it from a first person's perspective, so when you look down at yourself you actually see the girl's body. And this shows to be more important than the synchronous and synchronous stroking.

7 minutes of stroking gets the volunteer comfortable, and then the virtual perspective changes from first to third person and the mood changes. Immediately after the experiment volunteers said on average they felt their arm was being stroked by the virtual woman. Even though the visual image of the girl's arm was less convincing.

We've done another experiment where we actually look at how much realism is important, and it shows that what is important is not the visual quality but just the way virtual reality reacts to what you're doing.

Virtual reality is already being used by the US military to treat troops suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, could become more helpful in many other areas.

If you would have some abuser put into virtual reality where they are actually the victim of the abuse. That could change their view of what's, what they are actually causing to that person.

Spindly said the new way of 3D consumer technology such as the wii would make virtual reality common place in the home of the future.

Steward, Reuters, Barcelona.