Virtual experience and human thermal state: application of mixed immersive virtual environments

Although immersive virtual environments (IVEs) have been increasingly applied to building design, they mostly provide audio and visual perception to users, but not thermoception. This is a significant limitation, because thermal state (i.e., thermal sensation, thermal comfort, and thermal acceptability) plays an important role in understanding human-building interactions during design. Mixed immersive virtual environments (MIVEs), i.e., combining IVEs with a climate chamber, are a potential solution to thermoception analysis during building design. Experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that participants' virtual experience did not significantly alter their thermal state compared to their in-situ experience. Response variables were the control temperature distribution over thermal state scales, the thermal state vote distribution over thermal state scales at a certain temperature step, and the physiological responses. The results show that the first two response variables were not significantly different between the in-situ and the MIVE experiments. Due to wearing the head mounted display in the MIVE experiments, the forehead skin temperatures were significantly higher than those in the in-situ experiments in most cases. However, such difference in skin temperatures did not affect the general thermal state. MIVEs are potentially a reliable apparatus to collect thermal state data for design decision-making.