body image, neuroscience and Kinect

As a child, I used to wonder why my mind corresponds to this particular body, and daydreamed about controlling other bodies, and extra limbs with my mind. What would it be like to have a third arm, or an elephant's trunk? What would it be like to be really tall and strong, or to inhabit a female body? The movie "Strange Days" has an "experience machine" that plays experiences into your brain, all 5 senses and perhaps some higher-level percepts; but IIRC, there was a clean Cartesian separation between body and mind, so that emotions were solely in the mind of the beholder.

A month or so ago, I read about the arm illusion, which suggests that our body image is largely manufactured by visual cues. Then I was struck with the idea of using something like Kinect to give the illusion of inhabiting another body. Today I was happy to find the Body Swap hack, though the polygons look rough and it mostly just looks like you've swapped clothing. The body dysmorphia project has better graphics, but apparently the only change it can make is to make you look more or less puffy.

Tangentially, your brain learns from visual feedback. Ramachandran has shown that one can get rid of phantom limb pain by exercises with a mirror box, which are really a form of visual biofeedback. It makes one wonder if living in virtual bodies that are very different from yours could make you physically awkward once you return to your real body.