Can a virtual forest be enough to make us feel better?

You're in the office, it's raining outside, you have a day ahead of you that seems like it will never end, and someone suggests spending ten minutes in a forest. But not a walk to the nearest woodland. Instead, a headset, headphones, 360-degree images, the sound of leaves, and perhaps even the scent of trees.

Does it work?

The short answer is: it can help. The longer answer is much more interesting.

Especially because it starts from a fact that is now fairly well established: spending time in natural environments can help us recover from stress and have positive effects on psychological well-being. This is also where the Japanese practice of Shinrin-yoku comes in, literally “forest bathing”: an expression that does not refer to a particular sport or therapeutic activity, but simply to mindful immersion in a forest environment.

Over the years, scientific research has investigated the effects of this kind of experience on stress, mood and certain physiological parameters. The findings should be interpreted with caution, because studies use very different methods and measures, but the overall picture suggests that contact with nature can have a restorative effect. And this leads to a new question: if we can't reach a forest, can we at least bring one to us?

In the forest, even when the forest isn't there

A recent study conducted by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development explored this question by focusing on a fundamental aspect of the forest experience: the fact that we perceive a forest with more than just our eyes.

Participants were first exposed to a situation designed to induce stress and were then immersed in different versions of a virtual forest. Some experienced only images of the natural environment, others only the sounds or the scent associated with the forest, while another group experienced several sensory stimuli simultaneously.

The idea behind the experiment is simple: if experiencing nature involves sight, sound and smell at the same time, does a virtual recreation of nature become more effective when it engages more than one sense?

The results suggest that, at least to some extent, the answer is yes. Exposure to the virtual forest supported emotional recovery after stress, while the multisensory condition showed some advantages, particularly in terms of positive emotions and a sense of connection with nature. This does not mean that adding sounds and scents automatically turns a headset into a forest, nor that a multisensory experience improves every single psychological or cognitive measure.

After all, anyone who has walked through a forest knows this. A forest is not just green. It is the sound of the wind moving through the treetops, the ground beneath our feet, the smell of damp earth, changes in the light, birdsong, and even that particular feeling of being in a space that extends beyond our field of vision.

For now, virtual forests are too simple

A recent systematic review published in Forest Policy and Economics analysed 34 studies on the effects of virtual forests on human well-being. The paper provides a useful snapshot of the state of research and shows a rapidly growing field, but one that still has important limitations.

Many of the virtual forests studied so far, in fact, represent only part of the complexity of a forest environment. Some characteristics that could influence the way we perceive a forest are still relatively unexplored: tree density, the presence of undergrowth, vegetation structure, deadwood and the overall variety of the environment. The situation is similar on the sensory side. Sound is relatively common in immersive experiences, while smell appears in only a few studies and touch is almost entirely absent.

This is an important limitation, because real nature is not a collection of elements that can easily be isolated. Our perception of a forest depends simultaneously on its structure, sounds, light, scents and our ability to move through it.

Paradoxically, however, this very simplification is also one of the main scientific advantages of virtual reality. In a real forest, we cannot simply change tree density, remove the undergrowth, alter the light or make a stream appear and disappear while keeping every other condition the same. In a virtual environment, on the other hand, we can change one characteristic at a time and observe how people's responses change.

Virtual reality, in other words, makes it possible to conduct experiments with forests that would be extremely difficult to carry out in the real world. Provided, of course, that we do not forget that a simulation is still a simulation.

When is a virtual forest actually useful?

This is probably where the research opens up the most interesting possibilities. A virtual forest could be particularly valuable in contexts where access to nature is difficult or impossible: hospitals, care facilities, schools, offices, large cities or situations involving limited mobility.

In these cases, the goal would not be to convince someone to stay on the sofa instead of going for a walk among the trees. Rather, it would be to offer a connection with nature when that connection is not available for practical or physical reasons.

And the multisensory aspect could be one of the most promising directions for the future. Experiences that combine images, sounds and other stimuli aim to come closer to the complexity of natural perception, although research in this area is still relatively limited.

Perhaps, then, the initial question calls for a less straightforward answer than we might like.

Can a virtual forest make us feel better? Yes, the available research suggests that it can have positive effects, particularly on emotional recovery and stress reduction.

Can it replace a real forest? No, at least not based on what we currently know. And perhaps that is not even its purpose.

Technology can help us better understand why natural environments matter for our well-being, and it can make part of the experience of nature accessible even when we cannot reach it. But a forest remains something more complex than the sum of the images, sounds and scents we can reproduce.