Introduction
stress reduction, hazy
Globally, there’s a noticeable decline in access to natural settings, driven in part by the shift towards sedentary learning and work habits. This is profoundly evident among students, many of whom have and will continue to allocate substantial time to remote learning. Additionally, with the advent of the Metaverse, particularly accentuated by Facebook’s rebranding [The There is emerging evidence that biophilic design in simulated environment can yield health benefits. For example, indoor plants could be conducive to stress-reduction and attention restoration [To explore the design of study environment in the Metaverse for students and examine their health responses to the biophilic elements, we used VR and wearable biomonitoring sensors to quantify the impacts of both positive and negative factors in built virtual environments on short-term health (i.e., stress reduction and cognitive function improvement within minutes or hours after exposure) of university students. Specifically, the study investigated the immediate physiological and cognitive responses (i.e., during the experiment session) to five virtual scenes of university classroom (same classroom) with different biophilic elements and turbidity (i.e., hazy outdoor view) which mimics air pollution visually. Although hazy windows are not the opposite to biophilic design, a study found that photos of gray cityscape caused by particle pollution could impede human stress recovery [