​​Investigating Environments’ and Avatars’ Effects on Thermal Perception and Regulation in Virtual Reality

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Niels Henze
• Subject Area: Image and Language Processing, Computer Graphics and Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous and Wearable Computing
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 565473277

The thermal environment is important for our health and well-being. Thermal comfort is also important for people’s satisfaction and physical performance and has effects on productivity and cognitive performance. As heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) require energy, maintaining thermal comfort in buildings has direct effects on energy consumption. As thermal comfort and energy consumption for HVAC are connected, building designers optimize for reducing energy consumption while maintaining thermal comfort to help combat climate change. Previous work showed that thermal comfort does not only depend on the actual temperature. The hue-heat hypothesis suggests that color temperature affects temperature perception and light’s color temperature even evokes thermo-physiological responses. Thus, it is possible to influence thermal comfort and temperature perception without changing the temperature. In preliminary work, we investigated how thermal comfort and thermo-physiological responses can be influenced in virtual reality (VR). Being in a fire world or having fire hands increases the perceived temperature and having fire hands decreases the hand temperature compared to having ice hands. Thereby, we show that thermal comfort and thermo-physiological responses can be influenced by interactive systems. As VR is increasingly adopted in many areas, it is expected that users will spend considerable amounts of time in virtual or mixed reality. While using interactive systems consumes energy and therefore contributes to climate change, designing immersive experiences to maintain thermal comfort could offset the energy required for cooling or heating the user's physical environment. With this project, we propose to systematically investigate how to design immersive experiences to maintain thermal comfort and thereby reduce the energy needed for heating and cooling. We will explore different virtual environments’ and avatars’ effects on thermal comfort physiological response. We will study the effects of repeated exposure, investigate the combined effects of environment and avatar, and determine the effects on how users change the physical temperature. The gained insights will be used to develop and validate a model that predicts effects on thermal comfort. This model will be used for a toolkit and a demonstrator that enables developers to implement our insights and users to experience our findings. Our work could help to increase users’ satisfaction, productivity, and performance by optimizing thermal comfort. Ultimately, we aim to strengthen Human-Computer Interaction's contribution to fighting climate change.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Austria
• Partner Organisation: Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung (FWF)
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Martin Kocur