https://matteocampagna.com/en/registry/mind/virtual-reality-archery-arousal Changes to this claim in Matteo Campagna's evidence registry: its status, its year-by-year history, revisions of the page. en-gb https://matteocampagna.com/en/registry/mind/virtual-reality-archery-arousalOnly one study has compared them, in twenty-two university students who had never shot before a fourteen-week course and who, at the end of it, shot ten arrows at eighteen metres with a bow and ten in virtual reality, using a headset and a game, in counterbalanced order. The body responds differently: with the bow heart rate reaches 109 beats per minute against 97 in the headset (d = 0.95), that is 32.5% above rest against 17.5%, and RMSSD, the index most closely tied to vagal tone, rises by 10.3% over rest when shooting for real and falls by 19.8% in virtual reality. Perception changes too: real shooting is rated harder, 5.43 against 4.00, and more effortful, 4.86 against 2.90. The mind, by contrast, seems to work the same way: reported anxiety is identical, 4.76 in both conditions, and confidence does not change. Breathing rate, SDNN and low and high frequency power do not differ, and the score is even higher in the headset, although the game may not count points the way a target face does. Two things weigh on the reading. The bow test was the course's final exam, with a minimum score needed for the credits, while the headset test did not count; and for someone who has been shooting for a few months, drawing a bow is still a real physical effort, which a controller with no draw weight does not ask for. So it is impossible to say how much of the difference is muscular load, how much is the exam and how much is virtual shooting itself. And they are students at the end of a course, not archers who have been shooting for years: the registry counts them as the general population, as in the other entries that use the same study, and the comparison has not been made in trained archers.claim:tiro-virtuale-attivazione:revision:2026-05-30:2Sat, 30 May 2026 08:00:00 GMT https://matteocampagna.com/en/registry/mind/virtual-reality-archery-arousalclaim:tiro-virtuale-attivazione:new_claim:2026-05-11:trasferitoMon, 11 May 2026 08:00:00 GMT