Virtual reality? Not for me. Then I turn into Wonder Woman and fly over New York

Elizabeth Day visits the virtual human interaction laboratory at Stanford University in Silicon Valley - and it blows her mind

My interest in virtual reality was virtually nil - until last month. When I thought of it, I pictured low-budget sci-fi movies with bad special effects. I thought of those pixellated posters, popular in the mid-1990s, the ones where you would stare at the wall and a three-dimensional vision of an underwater city would slowly emerge from a cluster of purple dots.

I thought of it as something that turned on adolescent gamers who sat at home in their underpants with the curtains closed and who dreamed of a day when they could fully inhabit the body of the bank robber guy with the stubble and the biceps in Grand Theft Auto. I thought of 3D glasses in 1950s movie theatres and the 360-degree cinema screens your parents took you to when you went on holiday to France and it was raining. The whole idea of virtual reality made me want to stifle an actual reality yawn. In short: I was clueless.