The Effects of a Stressful Physical Environment During Virtual Reality Height Exposure

Abstract

Virtual reality height exposure is a reliable method of inducing stress with low variance across age and demographics. As the virtual environment's quality of rendering fidelity increases dramatically, it leads to the neglect or simplification of the physical environment. This paper presents an experiment that explored the effects of an elevated physical platform with a virtually heightened environment to induce stress. Fifteen participants experienced four different conditions of varying physical and virtual heights. Participants reported significantly higher stress level when physically elevated regardless of the virtual height, which suggests that the inherent elevation will induce more stress within participants.