Can VR Trick Your Body into Feeling Hotter or Cooler While You’re Exercising?
Research by BU’s Dustin Allen suggests viewing virtual hot environments while exercising could help athletes and others acclimate faster to warmer places
Can VR Trick Your Body into Feeling Hotter or Cooler While You’re Exercising?
Can VR Trick Your Body into Feeling Hotter or Cooler While You’re Exercising?
One summer, Dustin Allen and his family installed a fake fireplace in their living room. It was the hottest time of the year, yet they were excited to try it out. When Allen, a Boston University Sargent College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences clinical assistant professor and program director of human physiology, turned the fireplace on—just for visuals, no actual heat—he began to feel uncomfortable and hotter, despite being in an air-conditioned room.
It was that moment when Allen started to wonder: Can what you see affect how your body feels and responds? Alongside a team of BU students, Allen began a research project looking at how the body gets rid of heat during exercise, investigating if visuals can impact the body’s ability to regulate its temperature.
Allen had study participants exercise in a temperature-controlled room at the same intensity for the same duration of time. Each participant wore a virtual reality (VR) headset to view different scenes—some warm, some cool. Sometimes participants would see a dry, hot environment, such as the Australian Outback; other times, they would view colder environments, like a snowy forest.
“What we are seeing—though we are still finishing the last bit of data—is that people sweat more when they view a hot scene,” says Allen. “As a result, their body temperature does not rise as much compared to when they are viewing a cold scene, even though the actual room temperature and exercise intensity are the same.”
Though it’s not realistic to expect people to begin regularly exercising with a VR headset, Allen says the findings can help scientists understand how to influence the body’s thermal regulatory response. The data could be especially useful for those who have to complete physical activity in hotter environments, such as athletes or military personnel, by helping their bodies begin the heat acclimation process ahead of time.
“Even something like speeding up the heat acclimation process by using a VR protocol could offer a physiological boost—getting a more robust adaptation from training in heat, even before you’re in the real environment,” says Allen.