Effects of virtual natural environment and meditative guidance to stress reduction in therapeutic applications

Previous studies and professional literature suggest that children suffering from severe anxiety could benefit from a relaxation application for therapeutic purposes. This thesis studies the effects of virtual natural environment and meditative guidance to relaxation and stress reduction, with the aim of investigating the suitability of those methods for a therapeutic application. The study consists of a remote experimental research of a therapeutic meditation application prototype built with Unity. Original implementation of the prototype was built in a research room in Tampere University facilities, but due to the situation with the Covid-19 virus in spring 2020 in Finland, it was not possible to study the effects of it on location, thus the research was conducted remotely with online methods. This research was done with 20 research participants, and it uses between-subjects design with three levels of independent variables. These variables are three different versions of the prototype; one version was only the audiovisual virtual natural environment with no relaxation instructions, another version included a meditative guidance audio to the virtual natural environment, and the third version was the full version of the prototype, which included a visual stimulus to the meditative guidance in form of an instructive virtual guide character. Online questionnaires, structured interviews and researcher’s observations during the research situation were used to gather dependent variables and additional data, while online meeting service was used as the research platform, and online video service was used for presenting the prototype. The results of the research suggest that the use of meditation guidance increases the relaxation effect of the virtual natural environment regarding reported levels of tension. However, no statistically significant difference was found on the reported levels of anxiety and relaxation. Furthermore, a general positive effect was found in all levels of the independent variable, confirming the findings from previous studies which suggest that experiencing a peaceful audio-visual virtual natural environment via computer screen and sound system has a relaxing effect to motivated users