The funny thing about this Yahoo News story about developing physical interfaces for virtual worlds is that it doesn’t make any quips, cracks or cheap shots about cybersex.

Making ‘Second Life’ more like real life

Now, technology from Japan could help make navigating online virtual worlds simpler by letting players use their own bodies — or even brain waves — to control their avatars.

Take the new position-tracking system developed by Tokyo University, which uses a mat printed with colorful codes and an ordinary Web camera to calculate the player’s position in three dimensions.

The user turns left, and the avatar turns left. The user crouches down, and the avatar follows.

“This technology lets you use take the actions you’d use in real life and transpose them to the virtual world,” said research leader Michitaka Hirose. “It could make maneuvering much, much easier.”

The attorneys at Virtually Blind consider the integration of physical stimulation devices with virtual worlds from the perspective of how they could be used violently — long-distance assault and battery, for example. Or how we could cause one another accidental injury if our actions in-world create more impact in the other person’s force-feedback vest than we intended. (The inventors of the Sinulator teledildonics system thought of this and included local thresholds for users, so you could turn the control to 11 and she would still feel it as a gentle 2, if she wanted.)

As you might expect, the potential for using the interfaces for violence hadn’t occurred to me, as I was too distracted by thinking of the possibilities for lovers. I’m such a Pollyanna! Yet when the physical and the virtual merge well, and keyboards become a quaint, archaic device we keep around for nostalgic purposes, I look forward to dancing, swimming and hiking in virtual representations of places I can’t easily get to in person. Making love when we get there is just a bonus.