Affective Evaluations of Rooms in ImmersiveVirtual Reality: The Effect of Naturalistic Elements

Immersive virtual reality (IVR) technology iswidely used in a variety of fields such as training, rehabilitation,clinical practice and gaming. This study aimed to investigateindividual affective/emotional reactions to some aspects of IVRenvironments. Specifically, we sought to understand whatcharacteristics of virtual environments elicit positive andpleasant emotional reactions. This is important because, asNorman (2002) wrote about good human-centered design,"attractive things work better." Since it is known that innaturalistic contexts individuals feel relaxed, restored andhappy, we created multisensory virtual rooms with colors,materials and sounds closer (e.g., wooden furniture andbirdsong) or farther (e.g., plastic furniture and traffic sound) tonatural contexts. Participants (N=28) were immersed in fivedifferent rooms and had to rate, on a 9-point Likert scale (1= notat all; 9= extremely), the extent to which each one inducedcalmness, energy, happiness, nervousness, tiredness, andsadness. The results showed that rooms with natural colors,furnishings and sounds elicited more positive evaluations and inparticular more calmness and happiness. In contrast, roomswith non-natural basic materials, cold colors and traffic soundselicited more negative emotional evaluations and in particularmore sadness. From an applied point of view, these resultsprovide useful insights for designing pleasant virtualenvironments in line with good user-centered design