According to this story over at The Raw Story, Second Life is an experimental playground.

No, not that way. I mean, it is, but that’s not what they’re talking about. This is cutting-edge virtual reality tech experimentation.

At a recent demonstration in Tokyo, researcher Katsunori Tanaka strapped a Web camera to his hip, lens down, and walked around on a large mat with specially coded patterns on it. On a large screen was the computer graphic-generated 3-D world of his avatar.

As Tanaka moved across the mat, the view on the screen shifted perspective. When he crouched down to peer under a virtual parked car, the image swerved to show what his avatar would “see” — the vehicle’s underside.

The system can track movements in 3-D because as the user moves, the patterns on the mat change from the camera’s perspective and the images can be processed to calculate vertical distance and tilt.

What’s interesting is the fact that they’re using SL to design these devices, since there are quite a few things that a mat won’t help you simulate.

However, the mat-tech isn’t all…

Across Tokyo at Keio University, another research team is offering a virtual experience that reaches even more deeply into the user.

Junichi Ushiba’s technology monitors brain activity so players can make their avatars move in “Second Life” just by thinking of commands like forward, right or left.

The interface uses electrodes attached to the user’s scalp to sense activity in the brain’s sensory-motor cortex, which controls body motions, according to Ushiba. Software then translates the brain activity into signals that control the avatar.

The difficult part is to stop thinking,” said research student Takashi Ono as he made his avatar stroll through a virtual Tokyo neighborhood in “Second Life.”

“I want to go left, so I think, ‘left’ — but then the avatar turns too far to the left before I can get rid of the command in my head,” he said.

Great. I had no idea that Linden Labs was even interested in finding Sarah Conner, but this might be a step in the right direction for that.

Of course, there are some basic features of SL that would be hard to utilize with this type of tech. For example, I’d love to see what you have to do on that mat to make this happen in-game:

I wouldn’t set it up under a ceiling fan, just to be safe.

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