Virtually real, in any case. A new treatment for phobias involving augmented reality has been developed that can infest your desk with virtual spiders. The breakthrough here is that the spiders are interactive, being able to crawl over books and sneak under papers. You can even pick them up. Oh, and it runs on Kinect. LiveScience has the story.
This would be one of those weird little projects Microsoft has enabled by throwing open the gates around the Kinect and letting anyone play with their toy. I give about ten minutes out in the real world before someone swaps the spiders out for nude-modded Skyrim models.