The Application Of Virtual Reality Technologyinto The Evaluation Of Sportswear Comfort

As people have more and more requirements about clothing comfort in sportswear, the evaluation of clothing comfort in sportswear is vital in these days. The core of the ’human-clothing-environment’ system in the evaluation of clothing comfort is human. There is a close relationship between human’s physiological sense of comfort and psychological sense of comfort. In addition, in the five-level system of the evaluation of clothing comfort which is widely used, the scene is not real enough for the body wear trials. And in the limited spot wear trials, the requirement for the environment is too high to afford or to be realized.Due to the development of the virtual reality technology, people can have the same sense in the virtual scene as they do in the real scene. If the virtual scene is similar to the real scene, there will be fewer requirements for the environment which is used to evaluate the clothing comport. In this way, the virtual reality technology is applied in the evaluation of clothing comfort. In this paper, a new method to evaluate the clothing comfort is built, which is called the evaluation method of clothing comfort in virtual scene. This evaluation method combines the body wear trials and the limited spot wear trials through the virtual reality technology, which changed the five-level evaluation system into the four-level evaluation system. Through the test in this paper, the subjective and objective indexes in the virtual scene test and the real scene test are compared to test the feasibility and validity of this evaluation method and to figure out the physiological and psychological indexes which fits to the evaluation method well.Nintendo Wii is used as the equipment of virtual reality technology. The badminton in Deca Sports is used to simulate the real badminton. Six male youth are chosen in this test to play badminton in virtual scene using the virtual scene evaluation method, and play badminton in real scene using the real scene evaluation method. The physiological indexes (including the lactate, the average heart rate, the evaporation sweat rate per unit area, the blood pressure, the skin temperature and the humidity under the clothing) are tested before/after the badminton in both scenes; while the subjective indexes (including the subjective thermal sense, the subjective humid sense and the sense of free movement) are tested after the badminton in both scenes. Each subject do the same test with four sets of sportswear.Comparing the subjective and objective indexes by using the two evaluation methods, we can get the conclusion that the evaluation method in virtual scene can replace the evaluation method in real scene in some degree, which certifies the feasibility and validity by using the evaluation method in virtual scene to evaluate the clothing comfort in sportswear. Besides, we can conclude that the lactate, the blood pressure, the humidity under the clothing, the subjective thermal scene, the subjective humid scene and the scene of free movement fit to this evaluation method; while the average heart rate, the evaporation sweat rate per unit area and the skin temperature don’t fit to this evaluation method.The evaluation method in virtual scene built in this paper enables the subject to evaluate the clothing comfort without the limit of the outside environment, which lowers the expense to do the body wear trials. Moreover, the virtual reality technology makes the virtual scene looks as real. This evaluation method has a lot of obvious advantages such as cheap, convenient and controllable, which is a wide research field.