Effects of Space and Scenery on Virtual Pet-Assisted Activity

Abstract

In recent years, 15% of the working population have suffered from mental disorders. Such conditions cause low productivity, absence of diseases, and unemployment. In addition, the treatment of mental disorders takes a long time, so routine precautions are essential. One of the ways to prevent mental disorders is to achieve healing through interaction with animals. However, this method has not been widely accepted because of the difficulties in handling animals. To solve these problem, we introduced a virtual pet through a virtual reality technology for three-dimensional stereoscopic visualization as an alternative to animals. We named the system that prevents mental disorders by interacting with the virtual pet as virtual pet-assisted activity (VAA) and verified that this system gained short-term psychological and physiological benefits. However, it was unclear what causes the system to have positive effects on users. This study investigated whether space factors affect the psychological and physiological aspects of the user and whether the scenery factor affected the psychological and physiological aspects of the user and its interactions with the virtual pet. The experiment was divided into two experiments for the space factor and scenery factor. As a result, it was not affected by the space factor but was affected by the scenery factor. The findings reveal that the open scenery is more effective than the closed scenery in the VAA system.