First, Arvid Guterstam made himself invisible. When he looked down at his body, there was nothing there.

He could feel he was solid; he hadn’t vanished into thin air. He even felt a paint brush tickle his transparent belly, while the brush appeared to be stroking nothing but air.

Being invisible is “great fun,” Guterstam reports, “but it’s an eerie sensation. It’s hard to describe.”

Then he took off his virtual reality headset and was back in the laboratory, fully visible. Guterstam is a medical doctor and PhD student, and he had just pulled off the first fully convincing illusion of complete invisibility. He went on to test 125 other people, and reports Thursday in Scientific Reports