The potential of applying immersive virtual environment to biophilic building design: A pilot study

Biophilic design is a popular form of sustainable building design because of its potential to contribute to human health and wellbeing. While many design processes are now mediated by computer technologies such as immersive virtual environments (IVEs), the reliability of IVEs to create the same benefits of biophilic designs as in-situ is yet to be determined. To this end, we conducted a comparative study to measure participants’ mood, cognitive performance, and stress level in in-situ and IVE experiment settings. A within-subject experimental design with thirty-five college students was applied to both in-situ and IVE experiments. The positive and negative scale (PANAS), visual working memory performance, and the sympathetic nervous system index and parasympathetic nervous system index were used as measures for mood, cognitive performance, and stress level of a participant, respectively. We found that natural element exposure in IVEs reduced negative mood in the same way as natural element exposure in-situ. However, we did not find the same for positive affect, visual working memory, and stress level tests. Factors such as the experimental procedure, exposure time to nature in both in-situ and IVE settings, and characteristics of participants may contribute to the results. Future research is needed to further investigate the impact of such factors and develop reliable experimental protocols.