What we did:We built Therminator, a thermal display concept that provides localized thermal feedback using flowing liquids through a network of tubes in Virtual Reality.
What we found:We found that varying thermal stimuli significantly impact perceived temperature and comfort, while also demonstrating that visual and thermal stimuli interact to affect user involvement.
Takeaway:Our research suggests that integrating congruent thermal and visual feedback in Virtual Reality can enhance immersion and user experience in diverse applications, such as training and entertainment.
Abstract
Recent advances have made Virtual Reality (VR) more realistic than ever before. This improved realism is attributed to today’s ability to increasingly appeal to human sensations, such as visual, auditory or tactile. While research also examines temperature sensation as an important aspect, the interdependency of visual and thermal perception in VR is still underexplored. In this paper, we propose Therminator, a thermal display concept that provides warm and cold on-body feedback in VR through heat conduction of flowing liquids with different temperatures. Further, we systematically evaluate the interdependency of different visual and thermal stimuli on the temperature perception of arm and abdomen with 25 participants. As part of the results, we found varying temperature perception depending on the stimuli, as well as increasing involvement of users during conditions with matching stimuli.
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