Reuters reported on November 27, 2007 that “People with severe paralysis could find new opportunities from shopping to doing business or making new friends in the virtual world of Second Life by just thinking about it, if experiments being conducted by a Japanese university bear fruit. In a recent demonstration, Junichi Ushiba, an associate professor at Keio University and head of the project, showed how electrodes attached to the scalp can pick up the electrical changes associated with brain activity.”
Second Life has the potential to change the way we learn, and in this example, the way we do eCommerce. To give people with mobility problems a way to explore a virtual world should give everyone involved additional motivation to improve the Second Life technology.
Keio University is located at 2-15-45 Mita, Minato-ku, Tokyo 108-8345: