Affective Evaluations of Rooms in Immersive Virtual Reality: The Effect of Naturalistic Elements

Immersive virtual reality (IVR) technology is widely used in a variety of fields such as training, rehabilitation, clinical practice and gaming. This study aimed to investigate individual affective/emotional reactions to some aspects of IVR environments. Specifically, we sought to understand what characteristics of virtual environments elicit positive and pleasant emotional reactions. This is important because, as Norman (2002) wrote about good human-centered design, "attractive things work better." Since it is known that in naturalistic contexts individuals feel relaxed, restored and happy, we created multisensory virtual rooms with colors, materials and sounds closer (e.g., wooden furniture and birdsong) or farther (e.g., plastic furniture and traffic sound) to natural contexts. Participants (N=28) were immersed in five different rooms and had to rate, on a 9-point Likert scale (1= not at all; 9= extremely), the extent to which each one induced calmness, energy, happiness, nervousness, tiredness, and sadness. The results showed that rooms with natural colors, furnishings and sounds elicited more positive evaluations and in particular more calmness and happiness. In contrast, rooms with non-natural basic materials, cold colors and traffic sounds elicited more negative emotional evaluations and in particular more sadness. From an applied point of view, these results provide useful insights for designing pleasant virtual environments in line with good user-centered design.