Master's thesis · TU Berlin · 2023–2024
Combating Homesickness with Immersive VR Design
TL;DR Version:
the Problem
Millions of students leave home to study abroad each year. Many thrive. Many don't, not because of academic failure, but because of homesickness: a psychological state consistently correlated with anxiety, depression, and reduced academic performance. Existing interventions address the social problem but rarely the sensory one. No one had seriously explored whether you could recreate the feeling of being somewhere through technology, and whether that was enough.
As someone who grew up in Lahore and moved to Berlin for my master's, I was living the problem I was trying to solve. Pakistani international students were also an underrepresented demographic in this research space, so the thesis filled two gaps at once.
Phase 1 — Understanding the problem
Before designing anything I ran a mixed-methods survey across 52 international students, combining structured Likert-scale questions with open-ended prompts analysed in SPSS and NVivo.
52
28/52
23/52
The critical design insight: homesickness isn't geographical; it's relational and sensory. The sounds of a street, the visual texture of familiar chaos. That pointed clearly toward immersion rather than information as the right design direction.
Themes & Word Cloud
Phase 2 — Feasibility study
I ran a technical pilot with a single participant to stress-test equipment and session design. The original plan included biometric data via a Samsung Galaxy Watch 6, but the Samsung Health Monitor app was geographically restricted and couldn't be configured in Germany.
I pivoted to carefully structured self-reported Likert questionnaires, kept consistent across both conditions so results would be directly comparable. The pilot also surfaced two practical UX considerations: headset placement affecting hairstyles, and accommodation for glasses wearers, both addressed in participant briefings.
Pilot participant during test run
Phase 3 — Designing the intervention
The content:
The VR experience was shot on an Insta360 ONE R Twin Edition across culturally rich locations in Lahore: the food street, Liberty Roundabout, the NCA courtyard, Old Lahore, and more. 10 clips of 20–30 seconds each were edited in Adobe Premiere Pro into a seamless 4:54 experience, precisely matched in length to the static slideshow for controlled comparison. The slideshow used 98 randomised images of Lahore at 3 seconds each, no audio.
The study design:
Main user study framework
18 participants, split equally: 9 Pakistani international students and 9 non-Pakistani students from 7 nationalities. Each completed a baseline questionnaire, experienced the slideshow, then the VR, rating emotional connection and UX via UEQ after each.
Participant viewing static image sequence
Participants during Meta Quest 1 experience
2D Depiction of 360° VR Content
results
UX quality — VR won decisively
Across all six UEQ dimensions, VR significantly outperformed the slideshow. Every difference was statistically significant (p<0.05).
| Dimension | Slideshow | VR | p-value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Attractiveness | 1.57 | 2.42 | 0.0033 |
| Perspicuity | 1.76 | 2.33 | 0.0150 |
| Efficiency | 0.90 | 1.78 | 0.0018 |
| Dependability | 0.79 | 1.43 | 0.0270 |
| Stimulation | 1.40 | 2.28 | 0.0106 |
| Novelty | 0.85 | 1.92 | 0.0033 |
Immersiveness and emotional connection
Immersiveness
score (out of 5)
Transformative
quality (out of 5)
Emotional connection post-VR
The Anemoia finding
Non-Pakistani participants reported strong emotional responses despite having no prior connection to Lahore; a phenomenon one participant named Anemoia: nostalgia for a place you've never been.
"It felt like I was present in the moment, and when I looked at the sky it was as if it's summer time in my hometown."
Non-Pakistani participant, post-VR feedback
"I found it extremely helpful in addressing homesickness, it felt as if I was back in my city and just observing with my own eyes."
Pakistani participant, post-VR feedback
Homesickness levels; a nuanced picture
HS scores rose after VR, but qualitative data tells the real story.
For Pakistani participants, the spike reflected VR's effectiveness at evoking home so powerfully it deepened longing.
For non-Pakistani participants, the increase was reported as a positive feeling. One participant noted the experience "convinced me to buy a ticket home."
VR didn't suppress homesickness, it activated and processed it. That's arguably healthier than numbing it.
Homesickness levels throughout the study
"It made me feel more connected to home. It was nice. I was considering visiting home next month and this VR experience kind of convinced me to visit and get a ticket."
Pakistani participant, post-VR feedback
Limitations and what I'd do differently
A sample of 18 limits generalisability. Self-reporting introduces social desirability bias, the original biometric plan would have complemented it well. Some Pakistani participants from other cities found the Lahore content culturally specific in ways that didn't fully represent their experience, pointing toward modular, personalised content as the right next step.
Future directions: AI-generated personalised VR environments, longitudinal studies on repeated sessions, and partnerships with university international student offices to deploy at scale.
The outcome
I set out to test whether immersion (not just information), could move the emotional needle on homesickness. Across 18 participants and a complete research study, the answer was yes.
VR outperformed a static slideshow on every measurable UX dimension. It created emotional connections across cultural lines. And it surfaced something unexpected: the feeling of belonging to a place may be more universal than we think, and design, done carefully, can temporarily reconstruct it.
Role & tools
Solo researcher and designer; full independence from concept through execution. Supervisors reviewed thesis document only.