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Chair for Human-AI Interaction
Department of Computer Science
Students in summer on north campus, red gears in background. © Roland Baege​/​TU Dortmund

CHI 2026 Honorable Mention for our VR Research on “A Tree’s Perspective”

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  • Research Highlight
A study participant embodying a tree in VR, enhanced with multisensory stimuli. © Lisa Townsend
A study participant embodying a tree in VR, enhanced with multisensory stimuli.
Our CHI 2026 paper on transitional and multisensory VR for nature connectedness received an Honorable Mention Award and will be presented in Barcelona next week.

With growing urbanisation, people’s opportunities to connect with nature are decreasing globally. Our paper, “A Tree’s Perspective: Enhancing Nature Connectedness Through Transitional and Multisensory Virtual Reality Experiences” (Lisa L. Townsend, Julian Rasch, Amy Grech, Bernhard Riecke, Sven Mayer), investigates how real-world transitions and multisensory stimuli shape a VR tree-embodiment experience.

Image explaining study design from Lisa's paper © Lisa Townsend
Study Design: We propose a holistic experience design approach for nature embodiment, incorporating transitional elements (e.g., biophilic design, music, ritualistic performance, post-VR reflection) before and after VR and multisensory enhancements (e.g., weighted blanket, heat lamp, oil diffuser) during VR.

Through a mixed-methods study, we show that both pre- and post-VR transitions in the physical environment, as well as multisensory enhancements during VR, can significantly increase participants’ sense of presence, embodiment, and nature connectedness. Notably, the emotional dimension of nature connectedness was still elevated one week later, suggesting lasting effects. Based on qualitative interview insights and impact ratings of specific design features, we discuss these results and derive design recommendations for future work.

Overall, our findings highlight that impactful VR experiences extend beyond the headset: designing the moments before, during, and after VR as a coherent experience can meaningfully enhance its emotional and transformative potential.

Lisa Townsend, Research Associate at our Chair for Human-AI Interaction at RC Trust, led this research project. The work was supervised by Prof. Sven Mayer and conducted in close collaboration with Julian Rasch (LMU Munich), Amy Grech (University of Strathclyde, Glasgow), and Prof. Bernhard Riecke (Simon Fraser University, Vancouver), reflecting our group’s commitment to high-impact international collaborations across disciplines.

This work was not only accepted as a full paper at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2026 – the leading international conference on Human-Computer Interaction – but was also recognized with a CHI 2026 Honorable Mention Award (top 5% of submissions). The paper will be available on the ACM Digital Library (DOI) upon publication. In the meantime, we invite you to explore the preprint.

Lisa will present the paper at CHI 2026 in Barcelona on Wednesday, 15 April (12:15 PM - 12:27 PM) in the session “VR and Immersive Technologies for Mental Health.”  The whole HAII team looks forward to attending the conference and engaging with the HCI community.

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