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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Virtual Real.
Sec. Virtual Reality in Medicine
Volume 5 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/frvir.2024.1452486

Increasing presence via a more immersive VR system increases virtual reality analgesia and draws more attention into virtual reality in a randomized crossover study

Provisionally accepted
  • 1 Virtual Reality Research Center, HPL, Mechanical Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, United States
  • 2 Cornell University Graduate School,, Ithaca, NY, United States
  • 3 VR Research Center at HPL, University of Washington, Seattle, United States
  • 4 Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative, and Pain Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, United States
  • 5 Human Centered Design & Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, United States
  • 6 Université de Montréal, Montréal, Canada
  • 7 Department of Anesthesiology, Critical Care and Pain Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston Children's Hospital,, Boston, United States
  • 8 Department of Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience, Central Institute of Mental Health, Medical Faculty Mannheim, Heidelberg University, Mannheim, Germany

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Researchers frequently speculate that Immersive Virtual Reality (VR) diminishes pain by reducing how much attention is available to process nociceptive signals, but attention has rarely been measured in VR analgesia studies. The current study measured how much attention VR uses. Using a repeated measures crossover design, 72 college students (mean = 19 year old) gave pain ratings (0-10 GRS scale) during brief painful but safe and tolerable heat stimulations during No VR, vs. immersive VR vs. semi-immersive VR (treatment order randomized). Compared to semi-immersive VR, during immersive VR, participants reported a significant 25% drop in pain intensity, and a significant 23% increase in fun during the pain stimulus, (p < .001 for each measure). As predicted by an attention mechanism for how VR reduces pain (the distraction hypothesis), participants made significantly more mistakes on an attention-demanding oddnumber divided-attention task during the immersive VR condition than during the less immersive VR condition. Secondary analyses also showed that immersive VR was still effective at higher pain intensity levels, and was widely effective regardless of gender, race, or participant's tendency to catastrophize.

    Keywords: virtual reality, Pain, distraction, Analgesia, Non-pharmacologic

    Received: 21 Jun 2024; Accepted: 13 Aug 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Hoffman, Seibel, Coron, Simons, Drever, Le May, Mason and Flor. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Hunter G. Hoffman, Virtual Reality Research Center, HPL, Mechanical Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, United States

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.