Mostajeran Fariba, Friedrich Moritz, Steinicke Frank, Kühn Simone, Stuerzlinger Wolfgang
Department of Informatics, Human-Computer Interaction Group, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, 22527, Germany.
Clinic and Polyclinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Neural Plasticity Group, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, 20246, Germany.
Sci Rep. 2025 Sep 12;15(1):32485. doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-19113-4.
Biophilic design aims to connect people to nature by incorporating natural elements such as plants in built environments. In immersive virtual reality (VR) environments, experiments have shown that, for instance, the presence of virtual plants in VR leads to higher cognitive performance and psychological well-being. However, it has not been investigated so far whether such effects extend to the performance of spatial interaction tasks such as path steering. In this paper, we explore the effects of the presence of virtual plants in an immersive virtual office environment on path steering performance in VR. For this purpose, we combined and replicated two previous studies in this field. The results of our study did not find an effect of the presence of virtual plants on steering time, as our participants performed all steering tasks in a similar amount of time in both biophilic and non-biophilic environments. We could, however, replicate one of the original studies on path steering in VR by Liu et al. and show that the steering time in our study also follows the extension of the steering law proposed in their work. Accordingly, we found not only a significant effect of the length ([Formula: see text], effect size: partial eta squared [Formula: see text]) and width ([Formula: see text], effect size =.96) of the steering path, but also a significant effect of the path curvature ([Formula: see text], effect size [Formula: see text]) on the time needed for steering through the path. We also found significant effects of path latitude ([Formula: see text], effect size [Formula: see text]) and longitude ([Formula: see text], effect size [Formula: see text]) on steering time. Our findings challenge the previous research, which demonstrated the positive effects of biophilic design in VR on cognitive processes, and therefore, pave the path for future work to better understand the effects of biophilic design on users' performance in VR.
亲生物设计旨在通过将植物等自然元素融入建筑环境，使人们与自然建立联系。在沉浸式虚拟现实（VR）环境中，实验表明，例如，VR中虚拟植物的存在会带来更高的认知表现和心理健康水平。然而，到目前为止，尚未研究过此类效果是否会扩展到路径转向等空间交互任务的表现上。在本文中，我们探讨了沉浸式虚拟办公环境中虚拟植物的存在对VR中路径转向表现的影响。为此，我们结合并复制了该领域之前的两项研究。我们的研究结果未发现虚拟植物的存在对转向时间有影响，因为我们的参与者在亲生物和非亲生物环境中完成所有转向任务的时间相近。然而，我们能够复制Liu等人关于VR中路径转向的一项原始研究，并表明我们研究中的转向时间也遵循他们工作中提出的转向定律的扩展。因此，我们不仅发现转向路径的长度（[公式：见原文]，效应量：偏 eta 平方[公式：见原文]）和宽度（[公式：见原文]，效应量 = 0.96）有显著影响，而且路径曲率（[公式：见原文]，效应量[公式：见原文]）对通过路径转向所需时间也有显著影响。我们还发现路径纬度（[公式：见原文]，效应量[公式：见原文]）和经度（[公式：见原文]，效应量[公式：见原文]）对转向时间有显著影响。我们的研究结果对之前表明亲生物设计在VR中对认知过程有积极影响的研究提出了挑战，因此，为未来更好地理解亲生物设计对VR中用户表现的影响的工作铺平了道路。
