As part of a program for adult learners this week, I signed up for a demo of one our Virtual Reality Labs. (The session on Monday about Lego, Coke and trashy mags was unfortunately cancelled due to lack of interest - shame!)

But this one had it's own disappointment. I don't know. Somehow I expected more.

Perhaps I'm spoilt by Star Trek's holodecks or Red Dwarf's 'Better than Life' but even Second Life with all it's limitations seemed a bit more engaging than this suite seemed to be. With screens forming three of the walls in the room and I don't know how many projectors, much of what they showed us was indeed very clever. But I don't know... the giant insect buzzing into our faces out of the screen seemed very Disneyland of more than a decade ago (or more). The walk around famous monuments in 3D wasn't unimpressive in its own way but made Second Life look like the height of interface simplicity. I don't know, I just expected more.

The highlight for me was the haptic pen with a kind of pen mounted on an arm/ball kind of mechanism which - when you pressed against an object on the nearby PC screen - responded as though you were pressing on something in real life. Sculpting what felt for all the world like an invisible bit of plant oasis, was quite interesting. Although it was immediately obvious just how much training you'd need to be any good at it. Even the academic and the research student in charge weren't very good at it.

Still, the lab gives students a chance to make and do things that I could only have dreamed of when at university.