Interaction in virtual restorative environments : How do different possibilities to interact affect the perceived restorativeness of a virtual environment?

Abstract: This thesis focuses on virtual restorative environments – specifically, the way that natural environments have been created in a virtual context to elicit beneficial effects on restoration and stress recovery. As the field of restorative environment research is mostly concerned with studying the environment itself, the interaction between participant and environment tends to consist of open exploration, and other ways to interact are often overlooked. The aim of this thesis was therefore to construct a virtual restorative environment with an additional possibility to interact, and to explore how the interaction is connected to a virtual environment’s perceived restorativeness. To gain deeper understanding about how different people perceived the virtual environments, the experiment was conducted using qualitative measures such as questionnaires, open questions and interviews. The results indicate that the perception of a virtual environment’s restorativeness is a very subjective matter, as the individual differences between the participants affected the way that they perceived the environments.