It’s a crisp winter morning in the Alps, or it looks that way at least. You’re walking through fresh snow, surrounded by pine trees, listening to the crunch beneath your boots. As you reach out to brush a frosty branch, you feel the weight of the snow drop away, but your fingers don’t feel a chill. The scene is immersive, the visuals rich, the sound convincing – and yet, something’s missing.
That’s because most virtual experiences still lack a crucial element: the ability to feel changes in temperature. Without that feeling, the illusion can quickly break down, but that’s beginning to shift. Advances in haptic technology, particularly around dynamic thermal feedback, are opening new ways to experience and interact with virtual worlds.
In this article, we’ll explore what thermal haptics is, why it matters, and what it will take to bring it from lab to everyday life.
The missing layer of immersion
Haptics has already brought basic forms of touch into digital experiences: vibration, pressure, and even thermal cues. But most systems simulate temperature in a static way: an object feels warm or cold, regardless of how you interact with it or what it’s made of. The result is a limited, one-note experience.
What’s changing now is the ability to introduce dynamic temperature gradients. Subtle, responsive changes in heat that follow physical principles like thermal conductivity.
Imagine sitting around a virtual campfire. As you reach for a marshmallow roasting stick near the flames, you feel the warmth grow stronger and stronger as you get closer and closer. When you pick up the wooden handle, you can sense the temperature gradient – warmer where the flames touch it, cooler toward the end where you’re holding. As you carefully move the marshmallow closer to the embers, you feel the thermal feedback intensity with each inch. It’s subtle, but unmistakably real.
Instead of assigning a fixed temperature to an object, thermal haptics replicates how heat flows through different materials, and how that sensation changes as the user moves, touches, or holds something in a virtual environment.
Why dynamic thermal feedback matters
Temperature gradients in virtual environments aren’t just about realism; they’re about function. In training simulations, for example, thermal gradients can teach users to identify overheating machinery by feel, just as they would on the factory floor. In accessibility contexts, they can offer an alternative to visual signals providing tactile information about an object’s state or safety, like whether a virtual surface is hot to touch or actively in use – helping make virtual spaces more intuitive, responsive, and inclusive.
These subtle shifts in heat could become as integral to virtual interaction as visual cues are today. Just as colour or sound can guide our attention, temperature could signal proximity, urgency, or change. Thermal haptics adds an entirely new dimension to digital environments, not by replicating the real world exactly, but by making them more intuitive to navigate and respond to.
Bringing thermal haptics to everyday life
The progress in thermal haptics marks a meaningful step forward for immersive environments. That said, unlocking its full potential will take more than innovation alone. To move from controlled demos to everyday experiences, we need to ensure interoperability between consumer devices such as augmented reality/virtual reality glasses, audio headsets, smart watches, and even haptic vests.
Just as video and audio rely on shared standards and formats, haptics needs its own frameworks to define how signals – including vibrations, forces, and now temperature gradients – are encoded, compressed, and synchronised across devices. Without this, experiences will remain siloed and difficult to scale.
As digital environments become more immersive, the sense of touch will be key to creating our truly multisensory digital future. With the right collaboration across research, hardware, and standards bodies, thermal haptics could help shape a future where digital interactions aren’t just seen and heard, they’re physically felt.
About the author:
Roope Raisamo, Visiting Professor, Nokia
