## 5 Discussion  
This systematic review critically evaluates the psychological benefits of experiencing nature through real-world and virtual urban green spaces (UGS). Our analysis underscores established benefits of real-world nature, such as relaxation and stress reduction, which align with previous findings in environmental psychology [49]. Similarly, emerging studies indicate that virtual reality (VR) representations of nature can also offer these psychological benefits [16; 50], suggesting their potential utility in areas where access to natural environments is limited, which is increasingly common in urban settings and with the rise of remote work after COVID-19 [51]. While previous reviews have established the psychological benefits of experiencing nature in the physical world [8; 17; 18; 19; 52; 53; 54] and through VR [20; 21; 22; 55; 56] separately, to our knowledge, there has been no review that explicitly reviews the psychological benefits of directly comparable real-world and VR nature. Thus, our systematic review fills the gap establishing that nature experienced through VR can have the same effect as nature experienced in the real world. \begin{table}
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A key focus of our review was to examine studies that explicitly compared the psychological impacts of real-world and virtual nature. While the therapeutic benefits of both modalities are well-documented, our review reveals nuances in their effectiveness. Studies employing immersive 3D virtual environments often reported outcomes that closely mirrored the experiences of real-world nature. In contrast, those utilizing less immersive 360-degree videos frequently reported less significant psychological benefits. This disparity underscores the importance of the level of immersion in virtual environments--fully immersive 3D settings appear to be more effective at replicating the sensory and emotional engagement typically facilitated by direct interaction with real nature. The findings from our review have significant implications for landscape architecture and urban planning. They support the use of immersive VR technologies in the design and planning phases of urban green spaces. For landscape architects, integrating VR could enhance design processes by allowing for the simulation and testing of environmental impacts before physical spaces are constructed. This is particularly relevant for urban areas where space is at a premium and the integration of effective green spaces requires meticulous planning to maximize their psychological benefits. Our review faced several methodological challenges. One limitation of our systematic review is the difficulty of developing precise search terms. In this review, we sought to narrow the scope of the review to studies that examine both virtual and real-world nature and ask whether the psychological benefits of nature in VR were comparable to those of the same nature in the real world. To do that, we used the criteria that articles must contain the keywords \"virtual\" and \"real\" in close proximity. This strategy will capture explicit comparisons like \"virtual and real nature\" or \"virtual forest and real forest\" and thus likely include articles with a virtual and real-world study and exclude studies that only involve a virtual study or a physical real-world study. If we did not impose a constraint that both virtual and real keywords must occur and must occur in close proximity, there would be an excessive number of results, most of which are likely in unrelated topics due to the multiple meanings of the keyword \"real\". Similarly, searching with only the \"virtual\" and related keywords without the \"real\" and related keywords produces an excessive number of results and many studies involving only the virtual condition but no real condition. Thus, due to the general meaning of the search terms, it is difficult to develop a precise search strategy.