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Students in university are experiencing increased stress levels due to their daily routines. Students can self-manage their everyday stress with the self-therapy application before it causes other problems requiring professional assistance. This study aimed to determine whether VRT-stressNOmore, an image-based virtual reality with a few realistic University Utara Malaysia environments, can reduce student stress. However, the evidence for image-based virtual reality as a self-therapy is still in the leakage phase. Therefore, the objectives are determining the features that support self-therapy, confirming the features through expert review, designing and developing, and conducting therapeutic test. Implementation of pre-production-post methodology to achieve the goals and objectives. During the week of final exams, 47 healthy undergraduates and 29 healthy postgraduates consented to participate in this study. The T-test result indicates the different values before and after experiencing VRT-stressNOmore, demonstrating the beneficial effect of reducing stress. However, additional research is necessary to confirm the potential and efficacy of VRT-stressNOmore as a self-therapy application for university students.

Presence has been described to be crucial in several virtual reality (VR) applications. Among the factors influencing presence, realistic virtual environment has been examined extensively from the angle of geometry-based virtual reality (GBVR) application. The visual of the applications has been manipulated by altering numerous technological characteristics or by adding more sensory information (such as touch and smell). However, realistic virtual environment in GBVR application often required complex programming and takes longer time to develop. As such GBVR application is not acceptable for the application that needs to have a collection of realistic panoramic virtual environments. An alternative solution for above statement is image-based virtual reality (IBVR) application. IBVR refers to photo-based images, stitched together to develop a realistic panoramic virtual environment. Based on this method, many realistic virtual environments can be created in much less time but with limited interaction function. Despite this limitation, realistic virtual environment in image-based virtual reality is expected to enhance user's spatial presence experience, which is supported by spatial presence theoretical model. There a few levels in this theoretical model before the formation of spatial presence, and the most important part in this theoretical model is primary egocentric reference frames (PERF), adapting calmness to produce spatial presence experience. Thus, this chapter describes the summary on adapting calmness as PERF.

Stress is one of the issues in mental health among the societies. Self-therapy has been an alternative to provide relaxation and to reduce stress that includes the use of guided imagery therapy (GIT). It could also take advantages of technologies that support the sense of presence. In this technology-driven era, Spatial Presence Model (SPM) has been applied in existing studies to develop virtual reality (VR) tools, while Guided Imagery Therapy (GIT) has been used as a treatment tool for potential psychological problems. Currently, no study has utilized both SPM and GIT in supporting the practice of self-therapy to reduce stress. Hence, this study aims to propose a hybridized model for Image-based VR (IBVR) that incorporates SPM and GIT for the purpose of technology-driven self-therapy. The Design science research methodology (DSRM) is used as the basis for conducting the study. The proposed model is expected to benefit the application designers as a reference in developing IBVR tools for self-therapy.