Study of Different Interaction Methods on the Healing Effect of Natural Environment in Virtual Reality

With the rapid development of society and information technology, people’s stress is rising following the cost of our daily life. The accumulation of stress can indirectly induce negative emotions, which may affect mental and physical health. As a result, it becomes an important issue to learn how to relieve stress. Many studies have confirmed that the natural environment can relieve both physical and psychological stresses. As Virtual Reality (VR) technologies become mature, it becomes more viable to design a virtual natural scene whose degree of realism is not much different from the real world. A few previous studies have attempted to use VR to relieve stress. However, few of them focused on how the ways of interactions may affect the healing results. Therefore, in this study, we aim to investigate the effect of different interaction styles in virtual reality environments on the effectiveness of healing and to provide new ideas for future healing approaches. We have designed an experiment to study the effects of interactions. Thirty volunteers were invited to participate in the study and were randomly assigned to one of the three conditions: without interaction, with handle interaction, and with gesture interaction. During the experiment of about 20 minutes, we measured the participant’s heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV) and used the Profile of Mood States (POMS) scale to assess their emotions before and after the experiment. The results showed that the heart rate and HRV had a significant decrease between the work stress phase and the immersive VR phase in all three groups. In addition, the gesture interaction group has a significantly better stress relief effect than the handle interaction group. For the emotion assessment, the results of the POMS scale showed a significant increase in the vitality profile of the three groups, and the gesture interaction group had the highest scores. The negative index mood scores of the three groups decreased significantly, and there were significant differences between the tension, confusion, and fatigue components of the three groups. In summary, the gesture interaction group with high immersion made the best effect on stress relief.