Virtual Nature, Delight, and the Pursuit of Happiness

November 9, 2026

Tara Pearson, a doctoral student in design and environmental analysis, shares her research as part of a special spotlight series celebrating the United States’ 250th anniversary. In this series, we’re inviting current graduate students and alumni to share how their research explores the past, interrogates the present, and helps us imagine the next 250 years of life in America to engage with this important milestone.

In a couple of sentences, what is the focus of your research?

I study delight! Nature reduces stress and mental fatigue, and it builds the emotional resources people draw on when life gets hard. That much is established. What’s uneven is who gets to have it, and the barriers include health, mobility, geography, and cost. My work asks whether we can design our way across that gap, and whether an environment can do more than return someone to baseline. My current project studies how the styling of virtual nature shapes emotional response, and whether unexpected elements—a purple tree, a magical-looking bird—produce delight rather than mere pleasantness. What works in a virtual forest can translate to our real-life spaces, from a lobby, to a waiting room, to a room someone rarely leaves. Access to delight is the goal and design is our means, so I study this on screens: A screen is something nearly everyone already has within reach.

What inspired you to pursue this area of research, and why does it matter today?

A combination of things. Our family’s matriarch, through her nineties, became increasingly unable to enjoy the nature-related activities that had brought her joy. I wanted to find a way to bring nature to her. While research suggests real nature is superior to virtual versions, sometimes it simply isn’t accessible—I want to close that gap.

When I started this work in late 2024, countless people around me were—and still are—carrying real uncertainty and fear, many overwhelmed with stress and desperation. The country arrives at this anniversary in the middle of serious upheaval and division; delight may even sound like a luxury right now. I believe the opposite: Positive emotion builds the resources people draw on when times are tough, and access to it is as uneven as access to nature. I’m driven to find ways for people to experience delight even during our darkest hours.

How does your work contribute to conversations about democracy, citizenship, belonging, or participation in society?

Thomas Jefferson drafted the pursuit of happiness into the Declaration of Independence, the document our nation celebrates with gusto every Fourth of July. Naming it an unalienable right is pretty unusual thing for a nation to do. Most commit to things like preventing harm. Ours commits to a positive state, and it specifies pursuit, which implies people need somewhere to go and some means of getting there.

Nature has been one of our answers to that for centuries, but it has never really reached everyone. It is least available to people with health challenges or disabilities and to people without the means to travel to nature. My work is one attempt at democratizing nature: If someone cannot get to it, bring a version of it to them, and design that version to do more than pass the time. Chasing delight is the pursuit of happiness, operationalized.

What does your research reveal about change over time in the United States?

Americans love a reboot. We rebuild and rebrand around ideas we keep deciding we care about. Access to nature is one.

Central Park was built on the argument that constructed landscapes could restore people who couldn’t leave the city. Lincoln set Yosemite aside during the Civil War, held for the public’s enjoyment. The reasoning was the same: Time in nature is good for people, and it shouldn’t be private property. To secure these parks, land was taken and communities were displaced. That history should inform not just how we understand beloved places, but how we build the next version.

Virtual nature may not displace people, but the infrastructure behind it can. Data centers need land, water, and power, and they are rarely sited where the powerful live. I think we can build them cleanly eventually, but not yet, and not at this pace. The pattern repeats—and it doesn’t have to.

What is one common assumption about your topic that your research challenges or complicates?

The assumption is that realism is the goal. That a virtual nature scene works better the closer it gets to a photograph, and that stylization is a compromise you make when you cannot afford fidelity.

I have found the opposite can be true. In one of my recent studies, an environment with a sprinkling of purple trees and an illustrated sky produced more delight than its realistic twin, and it did so even for participants who had told me beforehand that they preferred realistic imagery. People may not always be able to predict what will delight them—in fact, the unexpectedness may be doing the heavy lifting.

What challenges or opportunities do you think your field will help address over the next 25, 50, or 250 years?

We have a quickly growing population of older Americans. It’s a great problem to have, but one we lack the infrastructure for. We are also facing the escalating effects of climate change, including the loss of livable land and more people displaced from where they live. These are different populations in different circumstances, but both face major and destabilizing life transitions, and neither may be able to rely on real nature for restoration, let alone delight.

Our concerns in these situations center on keeping people safe and relatively comfortable. We rarely ask whether someone in crisis, personal or global, has access to anything that brings them laughter or an unexpected smile. I believe research into delight, while it solves no immediate threat to life, liberty, or property, will matter for a great many people in their pursuit of happiness.