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Previous research has shown the positive effects of exposure to real and virtual nature. To investigate how such benefits might generalize to ever-more-prevalent virtual workplaces, we examined the effects of the absence or presence of virtual plants in an office environment in Virtual Reality (VR) on users' cognitive performance and psychological well-being. The results of our user study with 39 participants show that in the presence of virtual plants, participants performed significantly better in both short-term memory and creativity tasks. Furthermore, they reported higher psychological well-being scores, including positive affect and attentive coping, whilst reporting lower feelings of anger and aggression after exposure to virtual plants in VR. The virtual office with plants was also perceived as more restorative and induced a higher sense of presence. Overall, these results highlight how the presence of virtual plants in VR can have positive influences on users, and therefore, constitute important design considerations when developing future working and learning spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many important decisions in the design process are made during fairly early on, after designers have presented initial concepts. In many domains, these concepts are already realized as 3D digital models. Then, in a meeting, the stakeholders for the project get together and evaluate these potential solutions. Frequently, the participants in this meeting want to interactively modify the proposed 3D designs to explore the design space better. Today’s systems and tools do not support this, as computer systems typically support only a single user and computer-aided design tools require significant training. This paper presents the design of a new system to facilitate a collaborative 3D design process. First, we discuss a set of guidelines which have been introduced by others and that are relevant to collaborative 3D design systems. Then, we introduce the new system, which consists of two main parts. The first part is an easy-to-use conceptual 3D design tool that can be used productively even by naive users. The tool provides novel interaction techniques that support important properties of conceptual design. The user interface is non-obtrusive, easy-to-learn, and supports rapid creation and modification of 3D models. The second part is a novel infrastructure for collaborative work, which offers an interactive table and several large interactive displays in a semi-immersive setup. It is designed to support multiple users working together. This infrastructure also includes novel pointing devices that work both as a stylus and a remote pointing device. The combination of the (modified) design tool with the collaborative infrastructure forms a new platform for collaborative virtual 3D design. Then, we present an evaluation of the system against the guidelines for collaborative 3D design. Finally, we present results of a preliminary user study, which asked naive users to collaborate in a 3D design task on the new system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the traditional design process for a 3D environment, people usually depict a rough prototype to verify their ideas, and iteratively modify its configuration until they are satisfied with the general layout. In this activity, one of the main operations is the rearrangement of single and composite parts of a scene. With current desktop virtual reality (VR) systems, the selection and manipulation of arbitrary objects in 3D is still difficult. In this work, we present new and efficient techniques that allow even novice users to perform meaningful rearrangement tasks with traditional input devices. The results of our work show that the presented techniques can be mastered quickly and enable users to perform complex tasks on composite objects. Moreover, the system is easy to learn, supports creativity, and is fun to use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]