I stand in the CAVE in my body-glove, complete with haptic interface. I choose from a menu of avatars. Personally I always choose the primitive mud-loving reptilian form. The respective pressure points from the reptile are mapped onto my suit.

In Tokyo, you enter your cave and choose an avatar. We see each other's avatar, we touch each other's avatar. I just hope you've chosen to be a mud-roller too, so we can gambol and play in the slime on the side of the Great Green Greasy Limpopo River.

It may take some time to get the haptic suits up and running, but...

At some level we've solved the interactive/narrative problem by putting two narrative producing machines, two narrative agents into the VR - you and me.

This could be very cool especially if one of the agents was an actor. Then the other's experience would be both free and shaped by the actor. Brenda Laurel talks about theater experiments using actors in audio contact with a director to create a "play on the fly" for an audience member. The next step would be to make the actor and director "virtual."

This is where it gets tricky.