Research on the Benefits of Biophilia Effects in Virtual Environments

Stephen Kaplan’s attention restoration theory (ART) proposed that exposure to the natural environment can restore and replenish direct attention abilities [1]. With the advancement of technology, entertainment, work, and life in virtual environments have become a trend in the future. Therefore, this study wants to explore the difference between biophilia on attention recovery in real environments and virtual environments, and understand the difference in the recovery effects of two elements (plants, pictures) commonly used in biophilia environment design. The experiment uses the Sustained Attention to Response Test (SART) to test the participants’ attention status, and uses the Perceived Restorativeness Scale (PRS) to understand the participants’ restorative feelings about different biophilic environments. According to the results of the SART test, participants exposed to real plant and virtual plant environments achieved significant attention recovery, while other environments, although not as significant, also had a restorative tendency. The degree of improvement in the number of correct responses (CR) before and after exposure to the environment in the SART test is ranked as follows: Virtual Picture, t = -2.57, p = 0.03, Real Plants, t = -1.79, p = 0.11, Virtual Plants, t = −0.87, p = 0.41, Real Picture, t = -0.17, p = 0.88. The differences in the results of the SART test and the PRS scale in the four environments indicate that the virtual environment has a certain degree of impact on recovery, but it is currently uncertain which part caused the impact.