Student Marc Owens' project The Avatar Machine lets players live out their fantasy of wearing a puffy costume with a giant tripod of their spiky heads while viewing themselves as a virtual character in real space. Whose fantasy? Not ours! It's hard to see in the picture, but on there's an eye monitor on the costume's face. Owens explains how it works:

The user wears a body harness, which has three 2m long aluminum rods protruding from it, to form a type of tripod. A wide angle pinhole camera exists at the point where all three rods meet. The camera is pointing directly back at the user. The video footage being recorded by the camera is transmitted to the monitor inside the headset so it can be viewed by the user. Therefore the user can see themselves in the third person, from head to toe on the monitor interface.

The piece blurs the level between real and virtual — actually turning the traditional MMO RPG format on its ear. Interesting, sure, but feasible? Nope, but that's probably not the point. Brian Ashcraft

Marc's Project [Charming Disaster via WMMNA]