The Immersive Healing Experiences to Alleviate Office Workers' Stress in Urban Environments

Abstract

This study first focuses on clarifying the research problem: in the context of urban internet‐industry offices, what are the primary sources of stress under high‐intensity workloads, and how can immersive experiences be leveraged to effectively intervene and alleviate employees’ psychological burdens? Based on this problem, the research objectives were defined as follows: 1. Investigate the stressors and restorative requirements of urban office workers, and conduct an in-depth analysis of nature therapy principles. 2. Analyze modern office environments and identify optimal strategies for integrating multisensory digital technologies with nature -therapy frameworks. 3. Develop and prototype innovative immersive healing modalities, incorporating both application and empirical evaluation to quantify stress -reduction efficacy.In the research process, a mixed‐methods approach was adopted—combining literature review, case studies, questionnaire surveys, and expert interviews—to deeply analyze both the theories of nature‐based therapy and the characteristics of urban office settings. Drawing on these insights, a multisensory immersive experience prototype was then designed and implemented. Finally, two rounds of experiments of differing scales were conducted to quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate the prototype’s usability, immersion level, and stress‐reduction effectiveness.The experimental results demonstrate that the immersive multisensory experience—through the coordinated interplay of visual, auditory, olfactory, and tactile stimuli—significantly lowers participants’ subjective stress scores, yielding greater relaxation depth and increased job satisfaction. Moreover, by introducing spatial narrative theory to construct a nature‐based healing experience within an XR environment for the first time, this study not only opens new directions for design research in the health domain but also provides a theoretically grounded and practically viable model for the integrated innovation of future office spaces and psychological intervention strategies.

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