Application of Virtual Environments for Biophilic Design: A Critical Review

Maryam Mollazadeh,Yimin Zhu

doi:10.3390/buildings11040148

Abstract

Biophilic design as a new design approach promotes the integration of natural elements into the built environment, leading to a significant impact on human health, well-being, and productivity. On the other hand, scholars have explored Virtual Environment (VE) to create virtual nature and provide a complex experience of exposure to natural elements virtually. However, there is a lack of understanding about such studies in general, which use VE as a reliable tool to support biophilic design. Thus, the authors conducted a literature review on the applications, capabilities, and limitations of VE for biophilic design. The literature review shows that VE is capable of supporting critical features of biophilic design studies such as representing combinations of biophilic patterns, providing multimodal sensory inputs, simulating stress induction tasks, supporting required exposure time to observe biophilic patterns, and measuring human’s biological responses to natural environment. However, factors affecting user’s experience of a virtual biophilic environment exist, such as VE experience dimensions, user-related factors, cybersickness, navigational issues, and possible limitations of VE sensory input. Overall, biophilic design studies in VEs are still limited. Nevertheless, there are many opportunities for further research in this field.

Highlights

Throughout the past 100 years, the global urban population has increased dramatically [1]
Ecological validity is important, especially for studies that using Virtual Environment (VE) as a predictive tool [117,118]. This study considers both aforementioned applications of VE in regards to natural environments, but the focus is on the latter
This occurs owning to architects who consider VE primarily as a tool to visualize and design spaces planned for the physical world

Summary

Introduction

Throughout the past 100 years, the global urban population has increased dramatically [1]. Existing literature shows that biophilic design and exposing individuals to nature and natural environments can improve their overall health and well-being. Many studies explored and reported various psychological and cognitive benefits of natural and biophilic environments, such as improved cognitive performance [8], positive affective reactions [9] and affective functions, including problem-solving and creativity [10], improved productivity [11,12], stress reduction [11,13], the potential for restoration and fatigue reduction [14], psychological effects, e.g., positive emotions [15], positive mood and feelings of vitality [10], positive association with physical activity [16], increased feeling of safety in urban scale [17], and negative association with mortality [18]

Methods

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion