Research Progress in Virtual Healing Environments and Healing Benefits Thereof

The rapid development of virtual reality (VR) technology in recent years has provided technical support for the research and application of healing environments, and access to virtual healing environments has become a way to obtain physical and mental healing. Based on the Web of Science, ScienceDirect database and CNKI, this research reviews the literature published in the field of virtual healing environments from 2010 to 2022, and systematically combs the application fields and presentation technologies, healing benefit evaluation tools and influencing factors of virtual healing environments. Research results show that: 1) virtual healing environments have healing effects in such fields as emotional intervention, cognitive training and sports rehabilitation, and healing scenarios generally include virtual natural landscape, biophilic environments, etc.; 2) virtual healing environments can be divided into two categories by presentation technologies: head-mounted devices (HMD) and interactive media interfaces; 3) the combination of subjective perception scales and various types of physiological indicators are commonly used tools in empirical researches to evaluate healing benefits; 4) in addition to the content of healing scenarios, multisensory factors and interactive modes are also important factors influencing healing benefits. This research can, through discussing the limitations in current empirical researches, provide a reference for future research and practice in such fields as restorative benefits of virtual nature and biophilic environment design.