The effects of biophilic design on steering performance in virtual reality

Biophilic design aims to connect people to nature by incorporating natural elements such as plants in built environments. In immersive virtual reality (VR) environments, experiments have shown that, for instance, the presence of virtual plants in VR leads to higher cognitive performance and psychological well-being. However, it has not been investigated so far whether such effects extend to the performance of spatial interaction tasks such as path steering. In this paper, we explore the effects of the presence of virtual plants in an immersive virtual office environment on path steering performance in VR. For this purpose, we combined and replicated two previous studies in this field. The results of our study did not find an effect of the presence of virtual plants on steering time, as our participants performed all steering tasks in a similar amount of time in both biophilic and non-biophilic environments. We could, however, replicate one of the original studies on path steering in VR by Liu et al. and show that the steering time in our study also follows the extension of the steering law proposed in their work. Accordingly, we found not only a significant effect of the length ([Formula: see text], effect size: partial eta squared [Formula: see text]) and width ([Formula: see text], effect size =.96) of the steering path, but also a significant effect of the path curvature ([Formula: see text], effect size [Formula: see text]) on the time needed for steering through the path. We also found significant effects of path latitude ([Formula: see text], effect size [Formula: see text]) and longitude ([Formula: see text], effect size [Formula: see text]) on steering time. Our findings challenge the previous research, which demonstrated the positive effects of biophilic design in VR on cognitive processes, and therefore, pave the path for future work to better understand the effects of biophilic design on users' performance in VR.