One online firm, Plenus, runs a popular web portal called NetMarble which does a good business selling everything from virtual hats and handbags to virtual plastic surgery for computer avatars.

ECONOMIST: Computer games

The firm, entitled HelpMeSee, has two missions: to provide direct funding to surgeons in the developing world for low-cost lens replacement surgeries performed on cataract blind adults and children, and to train 30 thousand cataract specialists in the developing world a low-cost, cost effective surgery using virtual reality simulators and courseware adapted from aviation training.

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He also pointed out other potential uses: "A surgeon could perform remote surgery, by controlling their virtual self from a different location, " he said.

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NASA in one case, to control a robotic arm that mimicked the motions of the wearer and helped build the first surgical simulator, an abdominal-surgery training program featuring a virtual stomach, gallbladder, and intestines.

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In the future, surgeons may be able to take an MRI of, say, a liver and duplicate the picture on computers to take a virtual walk through the organ to plan for surgery.

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Then, on the following day, the doctors were asked to perform a series of simulated operations via a virtual reality program used to train doctors in laparoscopic surgery, a form of minimally invasive surgery performed with tiny incisions and a fiber-optic camera.

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Her "virtual image" is a secure marketplace for buying and selling branded clothing for your virtual self or upgrading your look, a kind of digital plastic surgery.

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No virtual-reality helmet is required, as it might be if conventional surgery were being simulated.

ECONOMIST: What the surgeon saw . . .

Virtual reality has already been used to help doctors learn the skills of brain surgery by offering a 3D image of a patient's head which can be operated on with a "software scalpel".

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