VR can train the human brain to treat wings like real limbs

In X-Men, Warren Worthington III sprouts huge white wings from his back and shoots into the sky. Scientists have yet to fully turn that comic-book trick from fiction to fact. But virtual reality, or VR, is offering hints of what it’s like to fly.

Yanchao Bi is a cognitive neuroscientist at Peking University in Beijing, China. She long had dreamed of flying. “It would be amazing,” she says. “Your whole world would become different.”

Scientists Say: Virtual reality

In spring 2023, Bi shared this wish over coffee with Kunlin Wei. Wei leads the university’s motor-control lab. There, researchers use VR to study how people perceive movement. The conversation sparked questions: Could people learn to fly with wings in VR? And how would their brains change?

To answer those questions, Bi and Wei teamed up with neuroscientist Yiyang Cai. In a new experiment, the Beijing team coached 25 people via VR on how to move virtual wings.

After training, the recruits’ Read Entire Article