Research at Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL) has found that even 90 seconds spent chatting and interactive with avatars is enough to elicit behavioral changes offline, according to an article from newsmagazine Time. Said lab head and assistant professor of communication Jeremy Bailenson: "When we cloak ourselves in avatars, it subtly alters the manner in which we behave. It's about self-perception and self-confidence."

With the aid of VHIL's $24,000 helmet which allows users to immerse themselves in virtual worlds, Bailenson and his Ph.D. students have been studying how how virtual experiences bleed into reality. In one experiment, volunteers were randomly assigned to look at attractive and unattractive avatars -- attractiveness being rated in a separate survey conducted beforehand -- for 90 seconds before they were asked to interact with other avatars. Subjects who were assigned "good-looking" avatars tended to display more confidence and extrovert traits, whereas the opposite was true for subjects with unattractive avatars.

In another experiment studying avatar interactions effects on real-world health, volunteers were randomly split into groups which watched avatars that looked like them running on treadmills, avatar counterparts just "lounging around," and avatars who did not look like the volunteers but were running on treadmills. The next day, participants who watched similar-looking avatars running on treadmills had themselves exercised an hour more in the intervening 24-hour period than volunteers in the other two groups.

Stanford is currently conducting a study on using older avatars to encourage users to start saving money for the future. Said Bailenson, "The most stunning part is how subtle the manipulations are and how difficult they are to detect, but how much it affects real life later on."