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Make a wish and you can go anywhere. That is the reality for a new computer invention, Chris Partridge says.

Computers are about to take people to take places they have never been able to visit before, including the surface of other planets. Such a trip will be an illusion, but one that comes closer to real life than anything on stage or screen. Artificial words are being build up in a computer memory so that people can walk through at will, look around, and even touch objects. The system is called virtual reality, so called from the mathematical concept of an image that has the virtues of real object without the substance. Virtual reality systems are being developed throughout the world for a range of uses including enabling people to walk "inside" nuclear power stations, while controlling a robot that actually goes into an area in which no human could live, and conducting architects trough a computer-generated building before constructed. British scientists have a world lead in virtual reality, despite the fortunes being poured into research by Japanese and American companies, which see it as a technology for the next century.

The problem with guiding a robot by looking at a picture from a camera mounted on it and twiddling the controls is that it is not a natural system, Mr. stone says. the operator spends all his time controlling the robot and none solving the problem the time lag between seeing the image and sending a corrective control signal is another difficulty. A virtual reality system consists of a helmet with a colourdisplay in front of each eye, and wide angle lenses to cover the entire field of view and give a stereoscopic effect.The helmet contains sensors, rather like electronic compasses, to record where it is pointing. A computer calculates what the wearer should be seeing in that direction and displays it in the screen. In more advanced systems, the operator wears an electronic glove that detects exactly what the fingers are doing and transmits the information to the computer. If the user tries to pick up something, the computer will make the object follow the hand to give the illusion of carrying it. Pads in the latest type of gloves press into the insides of the fingers and palm when an object is encountered, to create the illusion of feeling it. Complete 'exoskeletons' covering the user and allowing the computer to simulate almost anything possible in real life are still in the laboratory. A fire-fighter in a nuclear power plant, for example, would move through a computer model wearing an exoskeleton, while a robot would move through the real thing. The computer program will be derived the plant in data used to design the plant in the first place. Mr. Stone has developed a data glove with air pockets that are inflated to give a sensation of touch in collaboration with Air muscle, the supplier of the pneumatic systems that made the Spitting Image puppets really spit.

The biggest initial market is likely to be for a new generation of video games. W Industries, of Leicester, recently launched a virtual reality system for video arcades. The system, called Virtuality, consists of a cockpit in which a player sits, wearing the helmet, at a set of controls that can mimic a bobsleigh, a spaceship, or whatever the imagination of the games programmer can devise. The helmet has a pair of liquid crystal displays with wide-angle lenses giving a stereoscopic image, and a set of magnetic sensors to tell the computer what the helmet is looking at as it moves.

The first game is a fighter simulation. Another is based on a sequence in the film, Return of the Jedi, in which flying motor cycles race through a forest. The computer can link and control several helmets at once for a group game.