Emotional impact, task performance and task load of green walls exposure in a virtual environment

As the time spent indoors increases significantly due to the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, creating an indoor environment to promote the health of occupants has become critical. Although green walls efficiently realize a healthy indoor environment, few studies have analyzed their impact on occupants based on the visual element of green walls. This study measures the emotional impact, task performance, and task load of the subjects according to four virtual experiments (a non-green wall, a freestanding green wall, two freestanding green walls, and a full-sized green wall). The results of the four experiments are as follows: (i) The visual elements of the green wall had an emotional impact on the occupants, which was verified through the Friedman test; (ii) the effect of the visual elements of the green wall on the task performance of the occupants was not verified by the one-way repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA); and (iii) the task load of the occupants influenced their task performance, which was verified by the repeated-measures ANOVA. This study can help determine the optimal type and area of green walls by considering their impact on the occupants as well as on the economic and constructional aspects of the indoor space.