Presenting BIOXRE: project on BIOphilic design of Extended Reality working Environments

Nowadays, the technological maturity achieved by Extended Reality (XR) technologies allows to develop applications that foster positive emotions and promote personal growth. The scope of this work is to present the first results about a research project (BIOXRE - BIOphilic design of Extended Reality working Environments) focused on the application and evaluation of the biophilia hypothesis of Positive Computing in virtual workplaces. In the literature, there is effectively evidence that biophilic design improves human wellbeing. However, only a few studies evaluated its effectiveness in improving operators' wellbeing in the real workplace. For the first time, BIOXRE aims to exploit the biophilic design to XR applications supporting procedural tasks. The goal is to improve the wellbeing of human operators without affecting their performance in accomplishing manual tasks supported by XR visualization. The outcome of the project will be to extract guidelines for the spatial augmentation of real workplaces, fostered by the biophilic design, that will derive from a well-structured user evaluation in the target industrial scenario.