The Effects of Avatar and Environment on Thermal Perception and Skin Temperature in Virtual Reality

Martin Kocur, Lukas Jackermeier, Valentin Schwind, Niels Henze

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

9 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Humans' thermal regulation and subjective perception of temperature is highly plastic and depends on the visual appearance of the surrounding environment. Previous work shows that an environment's color temperature affects the experienced temperature. As virtual reality (VR) enables visual immersion, recent work suggests that a VR scene's color temperature also affects experienced temperature. It is, however, unclear if an avatar's appearance also affects users' thermal perception and if a change in thermal perception even influences the body temperature. Therefore, we conducted a study with 32 participants performing a task in an ice or fire world while having ice or fire hands. We show that being in a fire world or having fire hands increases the perceived temperature. We even show that having fire hands decreases the hand temperature compared to having ice hands. We discuss the implications for the design of VR systems and future research directions.

Original languageEnglish (American)
Pages (from-to)1-16
Number of pages15
JournalProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference onHuman Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’23)
Volume2023
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 19 Apr 2023

Keywords

  • embodiment
  • skin temperature
  • thermal perception
  • virtual reality

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