2021 Volume 33 Issue 3 Pages 678-685
In recent years, about 15% of the working population have mental disorders. It causes low productivity, absence, and unemployment due to illness. Treatment of mental disorders takes a long time, so routine precautions are essential. One of the ways to prevent mental disorders is to get healing through interaction with animals. However, this method has not been widely accepted due to the difficulties of handling animals. To solve these problems, in the previous study, we introduced a virtual pet as an alternative to animals by using virtual reality (VR) technology, which is three-dimensional stereoscopic, and we verified that this system gained short-term psychological and physiological benefits. However, it was unclear which factors positively affected users. Therefore, this paper investigates whether the virtual pet factor or body movement factor affected users’ psychological and physiological aspects. As a result of an experiment, it is confirmed that both the virtual pet factor and the body movement factor positively affect users. In addition, the user’s subjective evaluation implies that the interaction with a virtual pet’s interest in the system.
