Yan Wu
From virtual and reality - VR art therapy relieves anxiety
Summary
The pressure of modern society has caused people a lot of psychological problems. People often have social problems and anxiety issues. These mental health issues for people can stem from feelings of uncertainty about their identity, their sense of being, their sense of worth, their sense of control over their lives, and their connection to the world.
The project attempts to use VR design combined with plant elements to carry out artistic healing for anxious people, so as to help them relieve pressure. It also tries to discuss and help anxious people build confidence, increase social connection, and build a sense of self-identity and self-worth.
This research project will adopt a hybrid research approach combining quantitative and qualitative research to solve how VR interaction design and horticultural therapy can be combined to improve real world anxiety from virtual environments.
Additional info
In the process of exploring the integration of virtual reality (VR) with horticultural therapy, this study first constructed a VR scene as an independent virtual space and added a large number of green elements and natural elements to VR virtual scene.
Secondly, the basic model of different materials and shapes represented by the images of various plant roots and stems was created. The audiences can combine and change the form of the base plant model to create a plant model that can represent themselves and place it in the virtual space. Different audiences float in the virtual natural space world through different plant forms and roots made by VR, as the carrier of their spiritual expression in the virtual world. In the process of using VR to treat anxiety, audiences can create their own creations in different plant forms in the natural scenes of VR virtual space, expressing themselves and their feelings through silent forms.
The feeling of audiences exists in the form of plants in the VR virtual natural space, constituting a part of the virtual space. With the subtle changes in space and time, slight growth changes occur. The plant form model created by the audience will be presented in this VR virtual space as the carrier of the audience's emotions and spirits. This way of creation enables the audience to quickly have a psychological connection and identification with the plant models created by them during the creation process, thus reducing the audience's fear of strangeness and uncertainty in the virtual space.
The practical project underwent a meticulous production process, commencing with the creation of a vast virtual space utilizing Lumion. Within this virtual realm, various ecological elements, including mountains, rivers, flowers, grass, trees, and animals, were intricately placed. The large VR virtual space symbolizes a virtual utopian world, and the virtual space is set into four seasons, which change with the change of real time.
In the plant rhizomes module, this practical project collected a variety of different types of plant rhizomes. Including straight root, whisker root, rhizoid root, adventitious root. Such as sunflower, ginseng, potato and so on. Then, according to the abstract artistic root shape, Nomad was used to make some basic 3D plant root module for the audience to combine and use.
