Waves of the Future

About 10 years ago, when Jason Kutch first began surfing, he paddled out to ride the waves in considerable pain. Then a postdoctoral researcher at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Kutch had suffered for years with several chronic pain conditions, including migraines, low back pain and pelvic pain.

But after each novice surf session, he experienced an extraordinary shift.

“I got out of the water and I was like, ‘Where did the pain go?’” says Kutch, now a professor in the USC Division of Biokinesiology and Physical Therapy at the Herman Ostrow School of Dentistry of USC.

Each time, the pain didn’t return for several days. “Once I recognized how stable and reliable that pattern of pain relief was, it took all of the anxiety out of chronic pain,” Kutch says. “Finally, there was something that I could do to control it.”

That revelation touched off a decade of research into the neurobiology of pain and the promise of surfing as a therapy. Early on, Kutch gathered data at the shoreline, tracking chronic pain sufferers’ self-reported pain before and after surf sessions.

Today, his research participants don’t zip into wetsuits or paddle into the Pacific Ocean. They don VR headsets and catch digital waves at the USC Health Sciences Campus, thanks to an immersive surfing simulator Kutch and his collaborators designed and built in Kutch’s basement lab with support from the Southern California Clinical and Translational Science Institute at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. Users sit, kneel or stand on a surfboard mounted atop a motion platform that responds to movements they make in the virtual seascape.

“It simulates the momentary feeling of weightlessness you get when you’re caught by the wave, and then you can slide down the wave and carve back and forth,” Kutch says. “But unlike waves in the real world, in VR we can keep them perfect and going on forever.”

The project is one of several endeavors led by USC researchers that leverage realistic wave simulations to advance scientific discovery about ocean-related phenomena, from surfing to tsunamis. These technologies include both human-made waves in wave pools and interactive digital wave experiences, offering unprecedented opportunities for scholars to study — and users to immerse in — waves without the potential dangers, accessibility barriers and unpredictability of the ocean itself.

Making waves

“The technology of artificial waves goes back over 100 years,” says Peter Westwick, professor of the practice of thematic option and history at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, and co-author of The World in the Curl: An Unconventional History of Surfing. Westwick cites such notable attempts as a 1903 wave pool in Germany that used steam-driven mechanical agitators and a hydraulic-propelled wave machine in Tempe, Ariz., that introduced America to its first surfable artificial waves in 1969.

In recent years, wave simulations have become increasingly sophisticated — in part due to breakthrough digital and mechanical technologies pioneered by USC researchers.

Adam Fincham ’89, PhD ’94, adjunct research associate professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at USC Viterbi, collaborated with professional surfer Kelly Slater to design what is widely regarded as the world’s most perfect wave-pool wave. The hydrofoil system Fincham engineered displaces water in a way that closely approximates the ocean’s natural wave-creation force. A submerged 100-ton plow is dragged through the water by a vehicle on a track adjacent to a manmade lagoon, creating a swell of water.

The Kelly Slater Wave Co., where Fincham has been the chief scientist since 2010, debuted the technology in 2015 in Lemoore, Calif. — more than 100 miles inland. They turned a former artificial waterski lake into the Surf Ranch, a practice and competition hub for professional and aspiring surfers the world over. The team used computer simulations to design the contours of the lake floor, which, like a shallow reef in the ocean, coaxes the swell created by the hydrofoil to break into a surfable wave.

Slater’s signature configuration is a six-foot barreling wave that travels more than 2,300 feet, allowing for rides longer than one minute. Wave preferences can be tailored to the skill level of each visitor. The company’s technology also powers Surf Abu Dhabi, which opened in the United Arab Emirates in 2024 and holds the Guinness World Record for the world’s highest wave-pool wave (about 12.3 feet).

For Fincham — an expert in geophysical fluid dynamics, which is the study of flow and motion in large bodies of liquid — the Surf Ranch offers a unique scientific testbed. For the past several years, he and his collaborators have used the wave generator to make new discoveries about how the wind shapes waves.

Fincham notes that studying the effects of wind in the ocean can be challenging because natural conditions continually shift, and every wave is different. “The Surf Ranch serves as a laboratory where you can have the exact same wave again and again to perfect your measurements,” he says.

Waves without water

Advances in computing have paved the way for digital waves that look and behave like the real thing. To create a lifelike VR surfing experience, Jason Kutch collaborated with Heather Culbertson, associate professor of computer science, biomedical engineering and aerospace and mechanical engineering at USC Viterbi. Culbertson is an expert in haptics, which infuses virtual environments with tactile, force and motion sensations. The surfing simulator project has expanded her lab’s work into designing multisensory experiences that meld tactile and motion cues with visual and auditory ones.

Premankur Banerjee, a computer science doctoral student in Culbertson’s lab, developed the motion platform hardware that shifts the surfboard in space. He used a complex technique called motion mapping to coordinate the board’s movement with what users are doing and seeing in VR. Without this integration, riders would quickly get motion sickness.

Culbertson’s team designed algorithms to customize the behavior of the waves in Unity, a video game development engine. “Unity’s Crest engine only handles basic wave physics, so we’ve been doing a lot of adjustments in order to get to a wave that’s actually surfable,” Culbertson says. The motion platform is good at simulating waves up to two feet high, comparable to what you might see at many iconic surf breaks, Kutch says.

Kutch worked with Culbertson’s team to design the multisensory elements of the virtual seascape: a vivid coastal scene complete with leaping dolphins, swaying palm trees, sea caves and even a pirate ship. Users feel the wind in their face from a fan that tailors the force of the gusts to users’ velocity in the VR environment.

Paddling around, they hear the slosh of the water and the calls of seagulls; if they dive off the board and go underwater, the soundscape is muffled as if through liquid. Culbertson’s lab is developing haptic gloves to make users feel like their hands are touching and displacing water.

“We spent a lot of time making sure that the virtual ocean environment was engaging enough that we could compare the effect of surfing waves versus just being on the water and paddling around,” Kutch says. “We can really dial in on exactly which part of the experience affects neural activity.”

Kutch’s preliminary data suggests that surfing in VR affects a measure of brain activity called peak alpha frequency, which quantifies the speed of the brain’s resting oscillation.

“People’s brains oscillate at slightly different frequencies, and this baseline frequency is reliable and stable over time,” Kutch says. “The lower it is, the more pain-sensitive you are.”

Early data show that those who enter the VR surfing simulator with a low peak alpha frequency experience a temporary jump in this measure after completing a surfing session. Kutch hypothesizes that this boost may be one common mechanism contributing to the benefits reported in studies of surfing-based interventions for pain and other conditions, including depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and autism. These conditions have also been associated with lower peak alpha frequency, suggesting one possible avenue for future research.

Warning: Tsunami ahead

Though waves hold therapeutic promise, they also have destructive power. Last October, Patrick Lynett, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at USC Viterbi, traveled with a group of researchers to a remote Alaskan fjord to study the aftermath of a mega-tsunami caused by a massive landslide.

The tsunami began the morning of Aug. 10, 2025, after a chunk of rock with the volume of a small city detached from a mountainside adjacent to a glacier and slid into the sea. Like an anvil dropped into a bathtub, the rock made a colossal splash, generating a giant wave that ran nearly 1,600 feet up the mountainside on the opposite side of Tracy Arm fjord within a minute — the second-highest tsunami run-up ever recorded.

In Los Angeles terms, “the water got as high as the Hollywood sign,” Lynett says. “It scrubbed all of the trees and soil down to bare rock.”

After surveying the site in person, Lynett and his collaborators used computer models to recreate the landslide and the tsunami. Yet in terms of communicating about the event to the public, Lynett felt these state-of-the-art, highly accurate models failed to convey its sheer scale.

“I’ve been studying tsunamis my whole life, and I can’t really imagine what it would have been like to see water moving up a mountainside over 1,500 feet high in the course of a minute,” says Lynett, whose research focuses on building resilience to hazards like tsunamis and hurricanes in coastal communities.

Lynett decided to create a video game based on the computer-model data to immerse people in the event, virtually speaking. The game, called The Tracy Arm Tsunami Experience, allows players to explore the tsunami via four different modes of transport: running or driving an ATV on the shoreline, flying overhead in a helicopter or riding a jet ski in the water. The jet ski view is the most powerful perspective, placing users face-to-face with the gargantuan wall of water moving toward them at more than 100 miles per hour. Spoiler alert: There’s no way to outrun it.

Lynett hopes the game draws attention to the risks that landslide-generated tsunamis pose to human life. During the summer, tourist boats frequent Tracy Arm and nearby fjords to give passengers a closeup view of the glaciers. As the planet warms and glaciers retreat, adjacent mountains are destabilizing, making landslides more frequent in the fjords. Had any boats been within a few miles of last August’s mega-tsunami, there would have been no survivors.

“The idea with the video game is, if we can make the tsunami realistic and immersive, maybe we can better convey the message of caution to people who spend time in these locations,” Lynett says.

Riding into the future

USC researchers’ wave simulations are expanding access to wave encounters in places far from the coast.

Kutch and Culbertson plan to make their VR surfing simulator widely available to a variety of patient populations. “We see VR as part of a broader ecosystem of surfing-based therapies,” Kutch says. “For some people, that may mean ocean surfing. For others, a wave pool or a simulator may be the most practical option. Together, these approaches can make the benefits of surfing accessible to far more people.”

Beyond patient care, the researchers are also exploring recreational applications. “We’re looking at adapting this as a training system for surfers,” Culbertson says. “We’ll adjust not just the waves but also the controllability of the surfboard to be easier or harder based on the individual’s skill level.”

The next iteration of the Kelly Slater Wave Co. technology is the Austin Surf Club in Austin, Texas, where a new 2,200-foot surf basin and luxury clubhouse will become the centerpiece of a condominium community currently under construction. “Think of the surf club like a golf club,” Fincham says.

As these simulations bring realistic waves to landlocked contexts, they’re realizing a human quest begun over a century ago: to replicate this force of nature.

Could a “supernatural” wave that defies nature be next?

“Imagine if you could create a wave that allows an experienced surfer to do things that have never been done in the history of surfing, like a loop the loop in the barrel,” Fincham says. “That’s where we’re headed.”