Virtual Reality-Based Digital Landscape Experience and Climate Change Monitoring: Evidence from Human Thermal Comfort

Abstract

With the frequent occurrence of extreme weather in various parts of the world, people have begun to reflect on the scientific rationality of the means of global climate change governance. How to effectively respond to the hazards caused by extreme weather remains a hot issue of concern to the international community. In this paper, taking the function of plant carbon sequestration and oxygen release, which can regulate human thermal comfort as an entry point, we use virtual reality (VR) to construct a digital scene and invite subjects to conduct behavioral experiments in order to assess human thermal comfort. The experimental results indicate that participants’ subjective evaluations of virtual and real environments are consistent with changes in heart rate variability (HRV), validating the reliability of using virtual environments to study thermal perception. The study also found a significant correlation between HRV and the wet bulb globe temperature (WBGT) index, which both measure human thermal comfort. This suggests that when the WBGT changes due to microclimate variations, HRV changes accordingly. The negative correlation between plant carbon sequestration oxygen release capacity and HRV further supports this view. It also indicates that human thermal comfort can provide feedback on microclimate change trends, and that accurate monitoring of the microclimate is more conducive to assessing the progress of climate warming. This study demonstrates the association between human comfort and microclimate change, discusses the validity of human thermal comfort metrics in climate monitoring, and provides new perspectives for solving the global climate crisis.