Effects of biophilic interventions in office on stress reaction and cognitive function: A randomized crossover study in virtual reality

Abstract

Biophilia hypothesis suggests humans have an innate connection to nature which may affect our health and productivity. Yet we currently live in a world that is rapidly urbanizing with people spending most of their time indoors. We designed a randomized crossover study to let 30 participants experience three versions of biophilic design in simulated open and enclosed office spaces in virtual reality (VR). Throughout the VR session, we measured blood pressure, heart rate, heart rate variability, and skin conductance level and administered cognitive tests to measure their reaction time and creativity. Compared to the base case, participants in three spaces with biophilic elements had consistently lower level of physiological stress indicators and higher creativity scores. In addition, we captured the variation in the intensity of virtual exposure to biophilic elements by using eye‐tracking technology. These results suggest that biophilic interventions could help reduce stress and improve creativity. Moreover, those effects are related to both the types of biophilic elements and may be different based on the workspace type (open vs enclosed). This research demonstrates that VR‐simulated office spaces are useful in differentiating responses to two configurations and among biophilic elements.

The Impact of Moving through the Built Environment on Emotional and Neurophysiological State - A Systematic Literature Review

“…Of the six selected studies, three used ANOVA (Banaei et al 2017;Djebbara et al 2019;Yin et al 2019) as the mode of data analysis. REP-Tree (Ojha et al 2019) and Pearson's Correlation Analysis (Horvat et al 2018) were also implemented, with one study (Chen et al 2018) using qualitative data analysis presented in diagrams.…”

“…From our full-text screening, a number of studies enabled participants to be mobile in the test scenario. The factor leads to the removal of 18 papers, as only six studies tested participants navigating physical or virtual environments by natural walking (Banaei et al 2017;Chen et al 2018;Djebarra et al 2019;Ojha et al 2019;Yin et al 2019;Horvat et al 2018). These six studies (Table 1) form the basis of the discussion section of our paper.…”

“…Banaei et al (2017) exposed participants to various architectural styles in virtual reality by using mobile brain-body imaging and electroencephalogram while walking. Similarly, Yin et al (2019) investigated the impacts of open and enclosed spaces by monitoring ECG, GSR, eye tracking, pulse rate and blood pressure of participants. It is evident that there are a variety of valid approaches to studying the impact of architectural space on human physiological responses.…”

“…Four studies reported using virtual reality environments as their experimental setting (Banaei et al 2017;Djebbara et al 2019;Yin et al 2019;Horvat et al 2018), allowing participants to inhabit the space through movement using head-mounted displays. Two studies (Chen et al 2018;Ojha et al 2019) conduct their experiments in physical urban spaces, where natural walking is included in the tests.…”

“…Two studies (Chen et al 2018;Ojha et al 2019) conduct their experiments in physical urban spaces, where natural walking is included in the tests. All of the studies which utilise virtual reality as the controlled test environment only focus on the impact of visual stimuli (Banaei et al 2017;Djebbara et al 2019;Yin et al 2019;Horvat et al 2018). Among the ones that are conducted in a physical setting, one study (Ojha et al 2019) considers the non-visual or multisensory experience of the environment by measuring factors such as the temperature.…”