Thermal feedback

Thermal feedback, also called thermal haptics, is the presentation of warm and cold sensations to a user's skin by a computer-controlled device, usually called a thermal display. In virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) it is used to convey the temperature of virtual objects and environments, to help users tell materials apart, to deliver cues and notifications, and to add warmth to social interactions. Lynette A. Jones and Hsin-Ni Ho's 2008 review in IEEE Transactions on Haptics describes thermal displays developed to present thermal cues to the hand for object recognition in virtual environments and teleoperated robots, as well as for large-scale thermal effects in virtual environments, the encoding of abstract concepts and interactive art.

Many contact thermal displays use Peltier elements (thermoelectric modules) pressed against the skin. Others circulate warm or cold liquid, blow air, or heat the skin from a distance with infrared lamps, and some research systems create the impression of temperature without changing it at all. Thermal feedback has been built into research prototypes for head-mounted displays, gloves, wristbands and suits, and into a small number of commercial products such as WEART's TouchDIVER gloves. Size, power draw and the slow speed of temperature change compared with vibration are commonly cited obstacles to wider use.

Reviewed 13 October 2026. Checked every cited paper's authors, venue, year and DOI against Crossref/OpenAlex, the thermal perception and display claims against the Karmakar review, Therminator, ThermoReality and Villenave full texts, and all product facts against the cited Road to VR, Voices of VR, Teslasuit, WEART, Skarredghost and UploadVR pages. About review dates.

Thermal perception

Thermal displays are designed around how the skin senses temperature. A 2023 review of thermal illusions by Subhankar Karmakar, Anindita Kesh and Manivannan Muniyandi in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience summarizes the main properties. People sense a change in temperature rather than an absolute temperature, an observation the review credits to Weber in 1834. The smallest detectable change, the thermal detection threshold, depends on at least four parameters: the starting temperature of the skin, the rate of temperature change, the area stimulated and the body site. In one study cited by the review, at a skin temperature of 34 °C the warm threshold was 0.3 °C and the cool threshold 0.2 °C.

The rate of change matters a great deal. Within the neutral range of about 30-36 °C, an increase of 5-6 °C can go unnoticed when it happens at 0.5 °C per minute, while a much smaller increase is detected at 0.1 °C per second. Stimulating a larger area of skin increases the perceived magnitude of the sensation, a property called spatial summation, and sensitivity differs between body sites and declines with age.

Temperature perception also produces illusions that display designers can use or must avoid. In the thermal grill illusion, described independently by Thunberg in 1896 and Alrutz in 1898, interlaced warm and cold stimuli produce a paradoxical burning sensation. In thermal referral, a temperature sensation is felt in a region of the body where no thermal stimulus is present.

In a 2011 CHI paper on thermal feedback for mobile devices, Graham Wilson, Martin Halvey, Stephen Brewster and Stephen Hughes measured hot and cold stimuli on the fingertips, palm, forearm and upper arm, in static and mobile settings. They found the palm to be the most sensitive site and cold to be more perceivable and more comfortable than warmth; stronger and faster changes were easier to detect but less comfortable.

How thermal displays work

Karmakar and colleagues group thermal displays into three types by how heat reaches the skin: conduction, convection combined with conduction, and radiation.

Method	How it works	Examples
Conduction (thermoelectric)	A Peltier element or thermoelectric cooler in contact with the skin heats or cools it; reversing the current swaps the hot and cold sides	ThermoReality, ThermalBracelet, WEART TouchDIVER
Convection and conduction	Warm or cold water or air is pumped to an actuator that touches the skin	Therminator, PATCH
Radiation	Infrared or halogen lamps heat the skin without contact; fans are often added for cooling	Dionisio's VR Thermal Kit, HeatHapt
Illusion	Visual, auditory or chemical cues change perceived temperature without changing skin temperature	Trigeminal scents, color and graphics illusions

Peltier elements are widely used. Teslasuit's 2017 description of its temperature system, for example, said it imitated warm and cold by changing the voltage and polarity of the current through Peltier elements. The authors of Therminator noted that Peltier elements are easy to deploy and inexpensive but usually cover only 1-5 cm2 of skin; spreading the effect with conductive materials causes temperature losses and slower actuation, and arrays of many elements become rigid, power-hungry and in need of heat sinks, which can hamper movement in VR. In a January 2026 preprint, Sophie Villenave, Pierre Raimbaud and Guillaume Lavoué added that Peltier elements need cooling systems that cannot comfortably fit between a headset and the face, and often require power tethers or battery packs that impair mobility.

Fluid-based displays trade those limits for plumbing. The convection examples cited by Karmakar and colleagues include the Pump-Actuated Thermal Compression Haptic (PATCH) device of Goetz and colleagues (2020), whose actuators fill with water at 17 to 42 °C to give pressure and temperature cues together. Radiation-based systems avoid contact entirely. HeatHapt (Saga, 2015) focused halogen light onto the skin with a tilting mirror.

History

According to Karmakar and colleagues, Peltier devices were used in thermal displays for VR in the mid-1990s, citing work by Caldwell and colleagues in 1995 and by Jose Dionisio in 1997. Dionisio's article "Virtual hell: a trip through the flames", published in IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications in May 1997, described the VR Thermal Kit, a complete system to model, control and physically generate thermal stimuli on the user's skin. Villenave and colleagues describe it as combining infrared lamps and fans around the user with Peltier elements in the armrests of the chair.

Jones and Ho's 2008 review focused on displays that present thermal cues to the hand, and covered the models used to simulate the heat exchange between a hand and an object at contact, and how those models had been implemented in thermal displays. Later human-computer interaction research also applied thermal cues to mobile devices, as in Wilson and colleagues' 2011 study.

Applications in VR and AR

Head-mounted thermal displays

The face is a natural site for VR thermal feedback because the headset already touches it. ThermoReality, built at Keio University Graduate School of Media Design by Zikun Chen, Wei Peng, Roshan Peiris and Kouta Minamizawa, attached five thermal modules of 2 cm by 1.5 cm to the facial interface of an HMD. Each module held four Peltier elements, two diagonal ones for heating and two for cooling, so that it could change temperature quickly. The modules touched three points on the forehead and the area under each eye and were driven by an Arduino Mega with closed-loop PID temperature control. The related CHI 2017 paper ThermoVR (Peiris, Peng, Chen, Liwei Chan and Minamizawa) evaluated five face-mounted modules with 15 participants. Hot and cold stimuli given as directional cues were recognized with about 89.5 percent accuracy for cold and 68.6 percent for hot, and participants reported a higher level of immersion on the face when all modules were stimulated together. The group's SIGGRAPH 2017 poster also reports that moving thermal patterns across the face were recognized with about 71.84 percent accuracy. The system was shown as a SIGGRAPH Asia 2017 Emerging Technologies demo in which users opened a cold fridge, cooked at a stove and stood in front of an oscillating fan.

Ambiotherm, presented at CHI 2017 by Nimesha Ranasinghe and colleagues, was an accessory for HMDs with an ambient temperature module on the user's neck, a wind module aimed at the face and a Bluetooth control module. In desert and snowy mountain scenes, adding wind and thermal stimuli significantly improved sensory and realism factors related to presence.

Gloves, wristbands and body-worn displays

Feeling the temperature of a held object requires actuators on the hand. In 2020, Jinwoo Lee and colleagues reported a skin-like, stretchable thermo-haptic device that both heats and cools with a single structure, stretches by 230 percent and uses feedback control to adjust temperature. They mounted it on a finger-tracking glove so that users could feel cold beer bottles and hot coffee cups in a virtual scene. Karmakar and colleagues list its range as 15 to 45 °C, produced with p- and n-type bismuth telluride thermoelectric pellets.

ThermalBracelet (CHI 2019), also by Peiris and colleagues, placed thermal modules at six locations around the wrist, in a form meant to integrate with a smartwatch, and tested it for notifications, including spatial and temporal patterns delivered while wearers walked, read or performed distracting tasks. PneuMod (Bowen Zhang and Misha Sra, VRST 2021) combined a pneumatic silicone bubble with a Peltier device in each module, so that pressure and warm or cold cues could be shown together on sleeves, headbands and leg wraps for social touch and in-game feedback.

Therminator (CHI 2020), from Sebastian Günther and colleagues at TU Darmstadt, ran hot and cold liquids through flexible tubes worn on the arm and abdomen. In a study with 25 participants, the system presented 22.5, 27.5, 32.5, 37.5 and 42.5 °C together with visual scenes such as fire and snow. The thermal stimulus had the strongest effect on perceived temperature: a fire felt cold when paired with a cold stimulus. Visual scenes still changed ratings when the thermal stimulus was neutral, and matching visual and thermal stimuli increased participants' involvement.

Room-scale and ambient systems

Non-contact systems heat or cool the whole body without anything worn. Therminator's authors list examples including a large-scale thermal system for a CAVE by Hülsmann and colleagues and a fire evacuation simulation by Shaw and colleagues that used high-power heaters behind mechanical shutters. Villenave and colleagues used 300 W infrared lamps for warmth and axial fans for cooling, controlled from Unity over the DMX-512 lighting protocol, in a 2 m by 2 m tracked area. In their study of a desert island scene (25 participants) and a snowy mountain scene (24 participants), thermal feedback increased presence even though presence was already high without it; static and dynamic thermal feedback did not differ significantly on questionnaires.

Social interaction

Warmth has been studied as a social signal in VR (see affective haptics). At ISMAR 2024, Jeanne Hecquard and colleagues reported that warm feedback during a conversation with a virtual agent improved participants' perception of the agent and significantly increased persuasion and thermal comfort; in a second study, warmth was rated as more friendly, while warmth combined with vibration increased the agent's perceived presence and persuasion.

Thermal illusions

Because hardware is bulky and power-hungry, some researchers try to change perceived temperature without heating or cooling the skin. Jas Brooks, Steven Nagels and Pedro Lopes (CHI 2020) built a wearable that sprays scents such as mint- and pepper-like compounds into the nose; these also stimulate the trigeminal nerve, and participants rated VR scenes as significantly warmer or cooler with the scents than without. This connects thermal feedback to digital scent technology.

Visual cues alone can also shift reports. Therminator's authors cite an AR study by Weir and colleagues in which about a fifth of participants reported feeling heat on a hand shown engulfed in virtual flames, although no heat was applied. In a Graphics Interface 2023 paper on mixed reality, later posted to arXiv, Connor Wilson, Daniel J. Rea and Scott Bateman reported (n=30) that the color-temperature illusion could be recreated in MR and that dynamic graphics, such as a virtual ice ball or fire ball, produced a stronger effect. A VRST 2025 paper by Yannick Weiß, Marlene Eder, Oguzhan Cesur and Steeven Villa measured how far such illusions actually go. Visual and auditory cues reliably changed subjective judgments, but the measured offset in perceived temperature of touched objects was small, about 0.5 °C, and did not consistently match abstract ratings.

Commercial products

Several companies have shown thermal feedback for VR, but few products have shipped with it.

Product	Company	Thermal approach	Status
AxonVR haptic system	HaptX (then AxonVR)	Tactile pixels simulating temperature among other properties, shown at GDC 2017	Thermal dropped from the HaptX Glove (2018)
Teslasuit	Teslasuit	Peltier elements, 4 to 10 thermal points, 20 to 40 °C (2017 description)	Not listed among current suit features
ThermoReal	TEGway	Flexible thermoelectric array	Dev kit shown at CES 2020; launch planned for March 2020
TouchDIVER and TouchDIVER Pro	WEART	Thermal cues at the fingertips with force and texture feedback	First generation sold; Pro announced with pre-orders in June 2024
FeelReal mask	FeelReal	Heat, wind, mist and scent add-on for headsets	Announced for GDC 2015

AxonVR and HaptX. At GDC 2017, AxonVR demonstrated a box with an array of tactile pixels that simulated temperature along with other properties. In a Voices of VR interview recorded there, chief executive Jake Rubin said temperature was "a nice-to-have, but not an essential element" for most customers, and the podcast's Kent Bye noted that the thermal hardware added a lot of bulk. When the company renamed itself HaptX and announced its glove, Rubin said thermal feedback had been left out of the first product because customers saw it as nice to have rather than necessary, and because it was hard to miniaturize.

Teslasuit. A May 2017 Teslasuit blog post said the suit had Peltier elements with 4 to 10 thermal points depending on the version and a range of 20 to 40 °C. The current Teslasuit product page lists electrical stimulation haptics, motion capture and biometrics, and does not list a thermal feature.

TEGway ThermoReal. Korean company TEGway showed ThermoReal, a flexible skin-like thermoelectric array, at the Vive X Batch 2 demo day in San Francisco in June 2017. Road to VR's Ben Lang wrote that it reached its maximum cold very quickly and got hot enough to make him loosen his grip, and questioned a creator's claim that it rose only 4 °C above body temperature. At CES 2020 the company showed a development kit prototype made of two gloves, two sleeves and a forehead unit, which it planned to launch in March 2020 at a target price of US$1,000. Lang expected near-term use in training, rehabilitation, simulation and VR attractions rather than consumer gaming.

WEART TouchDIVER. WEART, a Milan-based company, makes the TouchDIVER family of haptic gloves. In a June 2022 review of the first-generation device, which covers the thumb, index and middle fingers, the blogger Skarredghost wrote that a small metal plate in each finger cap became hot or cold, that "the hot was really hot and the cold really cold", and that switching between the two was fast; the price was €5,000 per glove. WEART announced the second-generation TouchDIVER Pro on 11 June 2024, ahead of Augmented World Expo USA 2024, with force feedback, texture rendering and thermal cues across six actuation points on the five fingers and the palm; pre-orders opened that day at €3,900. WEART's thermal feedback page gives a range of 15 to 42 °C with 0.1 °C precision and says the effect depends on the virtual material, so that metal feels cooler than wood, while its TouchDIVER Pro order page lists a thermal range of 18 to 42 °C and a price of €5,900 for a pair.

FeelReal. In March 2015 UploadVR reported that the startup FeelReal would exhibit a mask add-on at GDC 2015; the company said it would let users feel wind, heat, water mist, vibration and smells, and the article described it as suited to headsets including the Oculus Rift DK2 and Samsung Gear VR.

Limitations

Temperature changes take longer than vibration: after trying TEGway's development kit, Ben Lang wrote that the effect was not as fast as rumble haptics, although it reached a noticeable hot or cold sensation quickly. A 2023 survey of thermal and wind devices by Aleph Campos da Silveira and colleagues in Multimedia Tools and Applications reviewed devices for delivering heat and cold to the skin, the limits users and authors reported, and why devices that produce both hot and cold airflow had not yet been built. Villenave and colleagues, summarizing that review, name latency and limited responsiveness due to thermodynamic constraints as common problems. Contact devices need heat sinks and power, which adds weight and cables. Room-scale systems avoid wearables but are large and limit the play area to the reach of their lamps and fans. Safety is also a design concern: Therminator capped its stimuli at 22.5 and 42.5 °C to avoid pain, and reviewers of both the TEGway and WEART devices described heat strong enough to worry them, even though TEGway said its device rose only 4 °C above body temperature and WEART's co-founder said the effect was safe.

See also

• Haptics
• Haptic gloves
• Haptic suit
• Affective haptics
• Vibrotactile feedback
• Force feedback
• Mid-air haptics
• Haptic rendering
• Digital scent technology
• Presence