An individual’s core temperature and thermoregulatory response to exercise requires integrated input from various temperature-sensitive receptors throughout the body. While thermal input from the skin and the internal environment are the largest contributors, it remains unknown whether simply viewing hot or cold landscapes can influence the thermoregulatory response to exercise during neutral and/or hyperthermic environments. Thus, the purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that viewing hot virtual reality (VR) landscapes augment thermal perception and whole-body sweat loss (WBSL), ultimately resulting a lower core temperature (Tcore) during exercise compared to viewing a cold VR, during exercise in neutral and hyperthermic environments. To date, nine participants (4 women, 5 men) have taken part in this study (age: 21.2 ± 1.9 years, height:172.6 ± 10.5 cm, weight: 71.4 ± 11.3 kg). After an initial screening visit, participants exercised at a fixed work rate (5 W/kg of metabolic heat production) for 40 minutes in: 1) a neutral environment (21°C, 30% RH) while viewing cold VR (N+COLD), 2) a neutral environment (21°C, 30% RH) while viewing hot VR (N+HOT), 3) a hyperthermic environment (30°C, 30% RH) while viewing cold VR (H+COLD), and 4) a hyperthermic environment (30°C, 30% RH) while viewing hot VR (H+HOT). Core body temperature (Tcore: telemetric pill), whole body sweat loss (WBSL: pre-post body mass), heart rate (HR: Polar), subjective thermosensitivity (TS: ASHRAE), and arterial blood pressure were collected throughout the study. Although trending towards significance, there was not a main effect of TS in the neutral (p=0.15) or hyperthermic (p=0.10) environments. Measurements of WBSL were not different in the neutral environments (N+COLD: 188.8 ± 32.6, N+HOT: 191.9 ± 26.4 g, p= 0.39) or hyperthermic environments (H+COLD: 313.4 ± 53.6, H+HOT: 325 ± 36.6 g, p=0.18). Despite this, when assessing Tcore, there was a significant interaction between condition and time (p=0.002) in a neutral environment, where the N+COLD condition led to a continued significant increases in Tcore at min 15, 20, 25 and 30 min (Holm-corrected pairwise comparisons: p< 0.05), while N+HOT had smaller, insignificant increases at the same timepoints of exercise. The same was not observed under hyperthermic conditions (H+COLD & H+HOT: condition: p=0.30, time: < 0.01, condition*time: p=0.24). This data suggests that your visual surroundings provide valuable sensory information to thermoregulatory centers in the brain during exercise, especially in neutral environments. Further research should explore whether viewing hot VR landscapes in neutral environments is sufficient to partially heat-acclimate an individual before a competition, military deployment, a heat wave, or other hyperthermic working conditions. This abstract was presented at the American Physiology Summit 2026 and is only available in HTML format. There is no downloadable file or PDF version. The Physiology editorial board was not involved in the peer review process.
Allen et al. (2026) studied this question.