VR nature scenes reduce sensitivity to pain – especially for those who feel present during the experience
Immersing in virtual reality (VR) nature scenes helped relieve symptoms that are often seen in people living with long-term pain, with those who felt more present experiencing the strongest effects.
University of Exeter
Immersing in virtual reality (VR) nature scenes helped relieve symptoms that are often seen in people living with long-term pain, with those who felt more present experiencing the strongest effects.
A new study led by the University of Exeter, published in the journal Pain, tested the impact of immersive 360-degree nature films delivered using VR compared with 2D video images in reducing experience of pain, finding VR almost twice as effective.
Long-term (chronic) pain typically lasts more than three months and is particularly difficult to treat. The researchers simulated this type of pain in healthy participants, finding that nature VR had an effect similar to that of painkillers, which endured for at least five minutes after the VR experience had ended.
Dr Sam Hughes, Senior Lecturer in Pain Neuroscience at the University of Exeter, led the study. He said: “We’ve seen a growing body of evidence show that exposure to nature can help reduce short term, everyday pain, but there has been less research into how this might work for people living with chronic or longer-term pain. Also, not everyone is able to get out for walks in nature, particularly those living with long term health conditions like chronic pain. Our study is the first to look at the effect of prolonged exposure to a virtual reality nature scene on symptoms seen during long term pain sensitivity. Our results suggest that immersive nature experiences can reduce the development of this pain sensitivity through an enhanced sense of presence and through harnessing the brains in-built pain suppression systems’’
The study, which was funded by the Academy of Medical Sciences, involved 29 healthy participants who were shown two types of nature scene after having pain delivered on the forearm using electric shocks. On the first visit, they measured the changes in pain that occur over a 50-minute period following the electric shocks and showed how the healthy participants developed sensitivity to sharp pricking stimuli in the absence of any nature scenes. The results showed that the participants developed a type of sensitivity that closely resembles that seen in people living with nerve pain - which occurs due to changes in how pain signals are processed in the brain and spinal cord.
On the second visit, they immersed the same participants in a 45-minute virtual reality 360-degree experience of the waterfalls of Oregon to see how this could change how the development of pain sensitivity. The scene was specially chosen to maximise therapeutic effects.
In the second visit, they explored the same scene, but on a 2D screen.
They completed questionnaires on their experience of pain after watching the scenes in each case, and also on how present they felt in each experience, and to what extent they felt the nature scenes to be restorative[LV1] .
On a separate visit, participants underwent MRI brain scans at the University of Exeter’s Mireille Gillings Neuroimaging Centre. Researchers administered a cold gel to illicit a type of ongoing pain and then scanned participants to study how their brains respond.
The researchers found that the immersive VR experience significantly reduced the development and spread of feelings of pain sensitivity to pricking stimuli, and these pain-reducing effects were still there even at the end of the 45-minute experience.
The more present the person felt during the VR experience, the stronger this pain-relieving effect. The fMRI brain scans also revealed that people with stronger connectivity in brain regions involved in modulating pain responses experienced less pain. The results suggest that nature scenes delivered using VR can help to change how pain signals are transmitted in the brain and spinal cord during long-term pain conditions.
Dr Sonia Medina, of the University of Exeter Medical School and one of the authors on the study, said: “We think VR has a particularly strong effect on reducing experience of pain because it’s so immersive. It really created that feeling of being present in nature – and we found the pain -reducing effect was greatest in people for whom that perception was strongest. We hope our study leads to more research to investigate further how exposure to nature effects our pain responses, so we could one day see nature scenes incorporated into ways of reducing pain for people in settings like care homes or hospitals.”
The paper is titled ‘Immersion in nature through virtual reality attenuates the development and spread of mechanical secondary hyperalgesia: a role for insulo-thalamic effective connectivity’ and is published in the journal Pain.
ENDS
Journal
Pain
Method of Research
Observational study
Subject of Research
People
Article Title
Immersion in nature through virtual reality attenuates the development and spread of mechanical secondary hyperalgesia: a role for insulo-thalamic effective connectivity
Article Publication Date
28-Jul-2025
A leap toward lighter, sleeker mixed reality displays
Stanford University
“In the future, most virtual reality displays will be holographic,” said Gordon Wetzstein, a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University, holding his lab’s latest project: a virtual reality display that is not much larger than a pair of regular eyeglasses. “Holography offers capabilities that we can’t get with any other type of display in a package that is much smaller than anything on the market today.”
Holography is a Nobel Prize-winning 3D display technique that uses both the intensity of light reflecting from an object, as with a traditional photograph, and the phase of the light (the way the waves synchronize), to produce a hologram, a highly realistic three-dimensional image of the original object.
Wetzstein’s latest holographic display, detailed in a new paper in Nature Photonics, moves the field toward a new age of lightweight, immersive, and perceptually realistic mixed reality glasses – glasses that project life-like three-dimensional moving images onto the wearer’s real-world view. From lens to screen, the display is just 3 millimeters thick. Such a tool could transform education, entertainment, virtual travel, communication, and other fields, the researchers said.
Extending reality
Holograms, Wetzstein said, provide a more visually satisfying, more realistic 3D visual experience than current stereoscopic approaches based on stereoscopic LED technology. And they come in a form that looks nothing like the bulky VR headsets of today. But, he acknowledges, it’s not easy to achieve.
Wetzstein and others in the field refer to it as “mixed reality” to convey the full impact of the display’s seamless melding of holographic imagery and views of the real world. One day, Wetzstein predicts, digital images and real-world scenes will be indistinguishable. In the meantime, this prototype is a “significant step” in that direction.
“Researchers in the field sometimes describe our goal as to pass the ‘Visual Turing Test,’” said Suyeon Choi, a postdoctoral scholar in Wetzstein’s lab and first author of the paper, in reference to the AI standard named for the famed British polymath and computer scientist, Alan Turing. In AI, the Turing Test holds that machines can only be declared truly “intelligent” when one cannot distinguish whether one is chatting with a machine or a human being.
“A visual Turing Test then means, ideally, one cannot distinguish between a physical, real thing as seen through the glasses and a digitally created image being projected on the display surface,” Choi said.
Thinking outside the eyebox
His group’s latest headset design achieves breakthroughs in image realism and usability by integrating a custom waveguide that steers the image to the viewer’s eye. The holographic image is enhanced by a new AI-calibration method that optimizes image quality and three-dimensionality.
The result is a display with both a large field of view and a large “eyebox” defined as the area in which the pupil can move and still see the entire image. This combination of large field of view and large eyebox – known in Wetzstein’s world as the “ètendue” – is highly coveted. The effect is a crisp 3D image that fills the user’s field of view for a more satisfying and immersive 3D experience.
Holography offers capabilities that we can’t get with any other type of display in a package that is much smaller than anything on the market today.”
Gordon Wetzstein Professor of Electrical Engineering
The leanness of the packaging cannot be overstated, Wetzstein said. The eyewear could be worn for hours at a time without the neck or eye fatigue that are a challenge with today’s wearable displays.
“We want this to be compact and lightweight for all-day use, basically. That’s problem number one – the biggest problem,” Wetzstein said.
The other challenges are realism and immersiveness. AI helps solve the first by improving the image resolution and three-dimensional qualities of the holograph. The third challenge is achieved by the device’s impressive eyebox and large field of view.
The experience is like having a bigger, more realistic screen in your home theater, Wetzstein said. “The eye can move all about the image without losing focus or image quality,” he added, noting that this is “key to the realism and immersion of the system.”
This latest research is the second installment in a scientific trilogy. Last year, in volume one, Wetzstein’s lab introduced the holographic waveguide that enables the high image quality in the lean form factor. Now, in volume two, they have built a working prototype to bring the finer details of the engineering to life.
Volume three could still be years off, Wetzstein admits, but that ultimate piece will come in the form of a commercial product that transforms how the world thinks of virtual reality – or extended reality, as the case may be.
“The world has never seen a display like this with a large field of view, a large eyebox, and such image quality in a holographic display,” Wetzstein said. “It’s the best 3D display created so far and a great step forward – but there are lots of open challenges yet to solve.”
Journal
Nature Photonics
Article Title
Synthetic aperture waveguide holography for compact mixed-reality displays with large étendue
Article Publication Date
28-Jul-2025
