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Editorial
Immersive medical virtual reality: still a novelty or already a necessity?
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  1. Tobias Loetscher1,
  2. A M Barrett2,3,
  3. Mark Billinghurst4,5,
  4. Belinda Lange6
  1. 1 Cognitive Ageing and Impairment Neurosciences, University of South Australia, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
  2. 2 UMass Chan Medical School, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA
  3. 3 VA Central Western Massachusetts Healthcare System, Leeds, Massachusetts, USA
  4. 4 Australian Research Centre for Interactive and Virtual Environments, University of South Australia, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
  5. 5 Empathic Computing Laboratory, The University of Auckland, Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
  6. 6 College of Nursing and Health Sciences, Flinders University, Bedford Park, South Australia, Australia
  1. Correspondence to Dr Tobias Loetscher, Cognitive Ageing and Impairment Neurosciences, University of South Australia - Magill Campus, Magill, SA 5072, Australia; tobias.loetscher{at}unisa.edu.au

https://doi.org/10.1136/jnnp-2022-330207

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    Virtual reality (VR) technologies have been explored for medical applications for over half a century. With major tech companies such as Meta (formerly Facebook), HTC and Microsoft investing heavily in the development of VR technologies, significant advancements have recently been made in hardware (eg, standalone headsets), ease of use (eg, gesture tracking) and equipment cost. These advancements helped spur research in the medical field, with over 2700 VR-related articles indexed in PubMed alone in 2022, and the number of VR articles more than tripling in the last 6 years. Recently, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) also approved the first VR-based therapy for chronic back pain.1

    Whether the technology has reached a tipping point for its use in medicine is debatable, but it seems timely to provide a brief overview of the current state of immersive VR in neurology and related fields. In this editorial, we will discuss the characteristics of VR that make it a potentially transformative tool in healthcare, review some of the most mature VR solutions for medical use and highlight barriers to implementation that must be addressed before the technology can be widely adopted in healthcare. This editorial will focus solely on immersive VR technology and will not delve into the applications and use cases of augmented or mixed reality.

    Characteristics of VR

    VR is a technology that allows users to interact with and experience a simulated environment.2 The technology typically involves the use of a headset or other device that displays a 3D computer-generated environment, as well as sounds and haptic feedback, and input devices to create a fully interactive immersive experience. The immersion establishes a sense of presence3—a user’s subjective feeling that they are actually present in the virtual environment. This subjective sense of presence is modulated by the employed technology4 and …

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