EVALUTION OF AUDIO VISUAL EFFECTS ON VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT BASED ON HEAD-MOUNTED DISPLAY FOR STRESS RECOVERY DUE TO MENTAL WORKLOADS

• Main Author: BELLA HERYANTO, NADYA
• Format: Final Project
• Language: Indonesia
• Online Access: https://digilib.itb.ac.id/gdl/view/41600
• Institution: Institut Teknologi Bandung

Development of technology lead to shift work dominated by physical activity to mental activity. Mental workload on company is getting higher caused by higher corporate pressure and rapid pace of corporate organization. This will give negative consequences on physical and psychological health as a mental workload that will cause stress. Stress on worker can diminish work performance and will harm the company. The emergence of virtual reality (VR) head mounted display (HMD) can be an alternative for stress recovery in the company. Experimental research of stress recovery is still limited, including study related to sound effects.This study was conducted by experiment in laboratory. The experiment use VR HMD with 36 participants. To find out the sound effects in the virtual environment for stress recovery due to mental workloads, measurement will be made on subjective changes in stress level by using STAI-S. In addition, there are objective measurements by using various parameters of heart rate variability (HRV) that measures continuously. In the experiment, the stress recovery process will be manipulated using virtual environment by adding nature sound and without nature sound. There is also a control group as a comparison. The entire experimental procedure was carried out for 45 minutes. Before doing the stress recovery process, participants will get stress induction by doing work task for 10 minutes.The experimental results, both subjective and objective measurements, especially on high frequency HRV (HF HRV) which related to parasympathetic activity showed that the addition of nature sound in VR HMD using natural environment is better for stress recovery rather than no sound. Therefore, it was found that the virtual environment without sound could increase stress after 9 minutes of stress recovery. The results of this study can be applied on companies to manipulate emotions from worker and recover their stress from mental workload, In addition, it can be a way of company to choose media with the right content for stress recovery.