The Impact of Nature Realism on the Restorative Quality of Virtual Reality Forest Bathing

Virtual reality (VR) forest bathing for stress relief and mental health has recently become a popular research topic. As people spend more of their lives indoors and have less access to the restorative benefit of nature, having a VR nature supplement has the potential to improve quality of life. However, the optimal design of VR nature environments is an active area of investigation with many research questions to be explored. One major issue with VR is the difficulty of rendering high-fidelity assets in real time without causing cybersickness, or VR motion sickness, within the headset. Due to this limitation, we investigate if the realism of VR nature is critical for the restorative effects by comparing a low-realism nature environment to a high-realism nature environment. We only found a significant difference in the perceived restorativeness of the two environments, but after observing trends in our data toward the stress reduction potential of the high-realism environment, we suggest exploring more varieties of high and low-realism environments in future work to investigate the full potential of VR and how people respond.