A concept for non-uniform thermal irradiation emulation in an immersive virtual environment

This study addresses the challenge of emulating human thermal environments without the need to build physical mock-ups. The aim is to complement the established technology of emulating visual environments with headmounted displays. For the user, the virtual environment (VE) emulates an arbitrary indoor environment including visual and thermal aspects. In contrast to conventional climate chambers, we describe a concept to emulate arbitrary non-uniform environments and room geometries without the need to construct or modify separate physical mock-ups for each scenario being tested. By fully emulating air temperatures as well as the thermal irradiation, a user can experience the same thermal sensation as in the actual environment. An air conditioning system and nine supply air diffusers are used for the air temperature and humidity control. For thermal radiation, 45 temperature-controlled surfaces are arranged in a hemicube around the user. An arbitrary environment's thermal irradiation is emulated by a projection of temperatures on the hemicube surface elements. This study compares two methods for setting the surface temperatures in the VE to emulate thermal irradiation. Finally, it presents the results of computational fluid dynamic simulations that benchmark the capability of the VE to emulate a non-uniform indoor thermal environment. For the non-uniform thermal environment benchmark scenario, the assumption of a uniform enclosure (using the surface average radiant temperature) resulted in a surface root mean square error of 2.2 K (local deviation of up to 4.6 K) of radiant temperature on the person dummy surface. The projection method was implemented for the VE, utilising temperature-controlled surfaces. Depending on the projection method used to determine the surface temperatures, it was possible to decrease the root mean square error of the radiant temperature in the emulated environment to a range of 0.4 K to 0.7 K.