Virtual Reality in Agriculture: Applications and Challenges for Sustainable Farming
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18111145Keywords:
Virtual Reality, Farming Systems, Crop Management, Pest Control, Soil HealthAbstract
VR is becoming a revolution in the contemporary agriculture industry, as it provides immersive, interactive, and data-rich solutions that improve the decision-making process, training, and management of systems. This review will summarize the recent research in three areas of critical importance in crop management, pest management, and soil health by considering peer-reviewed literature, technology case reports and conceptual frameworks published between 2016 and 2025.The paper is methodologically thematic synthesis, after which the applications of VR are divided into categories in terms of functionality, seamless fusion with other technologies (e.g., drones, AI, IoT), as well as of interest to sustainable farming practices. The most important findings are that VR can be used to improve crop management by simulating fields and making precise interventions and visualization of data, pest control by virtual scouting, testing scenarios, and non-chemical integrated pest management (IPM), soil health education and monitoring based on 3D simulation and spatial analytics. All these applications prove that VR is a useful tool to enhance training, minimize operational risks, and make adaptive decisions. The review finds that VR has significant potential to be deployed in sustainable agriculture, but its larger-scale application is limited by the need to address issues that concern the cost of hardware, its usability, and the simulation fidelity and ethical concerns. Computer-assisted, VR combined with AI, IoT, and big data analytics will make it one of the main enablers of resilience-driven, precision-focused farming systems.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Cengiz KAYA
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Accepted 2025-12-31
Published 2025-12-31
