Study of immersion effectiveness in VR-based stress therapy

Abstract

Stress problems often causes negative emotional response which tends to lead to a negative work performance. There are many treatments for stress such as going to gymnasium, undergoing hypnosis and taking medicine. Lately, virtual reality therapy (VRT) has been proposed as an alternative technique for stress treatment. In this VR-based treatment, one of the important elements to ensure its effectiveness is the level of immersion. In order to prove that the level of immersion does contribute to the effectiveness of the VR-based stress treatment, comparative studies with imaginary technique was conducted and analysed. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study on the effect of immersion level to participants when using our VR-based stress therapy [1] that includes typical Malaysian environment in 3D, zikr, and soothing audio.