Virtual reality as a tool for foreign students' anti-stress adaptation to a new educational environment

In an effort to strengthen their status in world rankings, universities in developed countries are actively fighting to attract talented students from different countries. Despite the prestige of obtaining education abroad, the process of adapting foreign freshmen to the cultural and educational realities of the host country is often accompanied by complex psychological, cultural and social adaptation, often followed by serious psychological problems. The creation of effective tools to level these problems will provide universities with extra points in the struggle for leadership in the export of education. Extensive opportunities in this regard are provided by virtual reality tools, due to its versatility and flexibility. In the framework of this paper, the potential of the virtual reality tool "Emotional Experience Designer", which was created as a tool to help people who are in crisis life situations, is analyzed. The results of its validation on a group of volunteers (n = 38) are presented, they recorded the statistical significance of the indicators of the participants' psychological stress decrease as a result of therapy through the "Emotional Experience designer". The result of validation has led to the creation of a modified version of the Designer, developed by the authors in order to level all its weak aspects and achieve its maximum effectiveness. The modified version was called "Learning without stress"training device. The results of its pilot study will be presented to the scientific community in the near future. © 2020 ACM.