I am not going to call this post "Virtual Insanity"

Last Thursday I had a little day out to Paisley, to attend a workshop on the use of Massively Multiplayer technologies in learning. Whilst presentations about different games were planned, the day essentially focused on one thing - Second Life. As close to Neil Stephenson's vision of the Metaverse as we're likely to see for a while, every corporate and academic force on the globe seems to be jumping on board. Hidden amongst the Second Life/ VLE mash-ups was a single mention of something quite exciting. Something real. Something that had actually been done, instead of been thought about or hinted at or conceived and dismissed in a single, academia-standard breath.

It was the Virtual Hallucination Project.

Set up as a research experiment to test whether symptoms of schizophrenia could be usefully represented in a virtual world, the project exists as a "virtual schizophrenia simulator", housed in an innocent-looking bungalow in the Second Life universe. On arrival, the player is asked to put on the "hallucination badge", and start the tour. Walking through the building, the player is subjected to various visual hallucinations - printed text metamorphosing before their eyes, chequered floor tiles appearing as stepping stones, their own reflection dying in a bathroom mirror. These are accompanied by a constant stream of "voices", telling the player how worthless they are and how they may as well be dead. Whilst the rather underwhelming 3D engine offered by Second Life gave the visual aspects of the tour less gravity than they deserved, the audio elements were really quite chilling, the relentless streaming of which giving (as far as I can tell) an incredibly accurate portrayal of the voices heard by schizophrenics - especially when heard through headphones.

After leaving the tour, I realised something quite scary: Second Life itself is basically one big schizophrenia simulator. Objects appear in the player's peripheral vision or on the horizon, then disappear just as quickly when the player moves to look at them; "voices" appear from apparently non-existent sources, or from inanimate everyday objects; walls, ceilings or even the floor the player is standing on can disappear at a moment's notice. Combined with the fact that the player is perfectly able to leave the hallucination tour with their voices from their "hallucination badge" still running, the whole Second Life experience could become very unnerving indeed. Where else but here could a tourist attraction leave you with such a chilling souvenir, as the virtual equivalent of a crippling mental illness?