97 research outputs found
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Examining the sense of agency in human-computer interaction
Humans are agents, we feel that we control the course of events on our everyday life. This refers to the Sense of Agency (SoA). This experience is not only crucial in our daily life, but also in our interaction with technology. When we manipulate a user interface (e.g., computer, smartphone, etc.), we expect that the system responds to our input commands with feedback, as we desire to feel that we are in charge of the interaction. If this interplay elicits a SoA, then the user will perceive an instinctive feeling of âI am controlling thisâ. Although research in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) pursuits the design of intuitive and responsive systems, most of the current studies have been focussed mainly on interaction techniques (e.g., software-hardware) and User Experience (UX) (e.g., comfort, usability, etc.), and very little has been investigated in terms of the SoA i.e., the conscious experience of being in control regarding the interaction. In this thesis, we present an experimental exploration of the role of the SoA in interaction paradigms typical of HCI. After two chapters of introduction and related work, we describe a series of studies that explore agency implication in interaction with systems through human senses such as vision, audio, touch and smell. Chapter 3 explores the SoA in mid-air haptic interaction through touchless actions. Then, Chapter 4 examines agency modulation through smell and its application for olfactory interfaces. Chapter 5 describes two novel timing techniques based on auditory and haptic cues that provide alternative timing methods to the traditional Libet clock. Finally, we conclude with a discussion chapter that highlights the importance of our SoA during interactions with technology as well as the implications of the results found, in the design of user interfaces
The Impact of Sensory Marketing: Analysis of its Attributes Towards Online Perfum Usersâ Behavior
Purpose: The tendency of consumers to purchase online today is enormous and requires the role of sensory marketing in providing a positive and memorable experience to all. In addition, since sensory marketing whether in online or offline settings can unconsciously govern shoppersâ judgement and purchase behavior, this paper aims to understand how multi-sensory information processing in the online environment is diverted from offline in the cosmetic perfume industry by leveraging previous research to analyze its effect on offline stores and emphasizing the present study on online retail stores.
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Theoretical framework: The research study conducted by Petit et al. (2019) attempts to explore more about digital sensory marketing and multisensory technologies. However, offline and online settings would have different effects and since perfume products require the use of our senses, there would be obstacles that prevent us from using our senses when sold online. This requires us to understand sensory marketing in the online shopping environment.
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Design/Methodology/Approach: This paper uses an exploratory study approach to gain in-depth understanding of the topic. The qualitative study is essentially built on primary data sources, through naturalistic observation and semi-structured interviews with 9 Generation Z individuals who are Indonesian citizens and have undertaken frequent perfume purchases online. A snowball sampling method was used in finding respondents for this study while interview results were analyzed using thematic analysis.
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Findings: The paper highlights the significant impact of sensory marketing through the use of sensorial cues, sensorial attributes, and individual differences in sensory perception. Ethical considerations when utilizing sensory marketing are also being emphasized throughout this study.
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Research, Practical & Social implications: Results of this study can encourage future research to help bring benefits for website/internet site designers, content managers, online perfume retailers, as well as academicians in general.
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Originality/Value: This paper draws attention to the growing use of online channels by cosmetic perfume industry actors and sheds light on the importance of sensory marketing practices in affecting online user behavior by answering what and how questions using exploratory studies.
Digitizing the chemical senses: possibilities & pitfalls
Many people are understandably excited by the suggestion that the chemical senses can be digitized; be it to deliver ambient fragrances (e.g., in virtual reality or health-related applications), or else to transmit flavour experiences via the internet. However, to date, progress in this area has been surprisingly slow. Furthermore, the majority of the attempts at successful commercialization have failed, often in the face of consumer ambivalence over the perceived benefits/utility. In this review, with the focus squarely on the domain of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), we summarize the state-of-the-art in the area. We highlight the key possibilities and pitfalls as far as stimulating the so-called âlowerâ senses of taste, smell, and the trigeminal system are concerned. Ultimately, we suggest that mixed reality solutions are currently the most plausible as far as delivering (or rather modulating) flavour experiences digitally is concerned. The key problems with digital fragrance delivery are related to attention and attribution. People often fail to detect fragrances when they are concentrating on something else; And even when they detect that their chemical senses have been stimulated, there is always a danger that they attribute their experience (e.g., pleasure) to one of the other senses â this is what we call âthe fundamental attribution errorâ. We conclude with an outlook on digitizing the chemical senses and summarize a set of open-ended questions that the HCI community has to address in future explorations of smell and taste as interaction modalities
Emotional Responses to Multisensory Environmental Stimuli: A Conceptual Framework and Literature Review.
How we perceive our environment affects the way we feel and behave. The impressions of our ambient environment are influenced by its entire spectrum of physical characteristics (e.g., luminosity, sound, scents, temperature) in a dynamic and interactive way. The ability to manipulate the sensory aspects of an environment such that people feel comfortable or exhibit a desired behavior is gaining interest and social relevance. Although much is known about the sensory effects of individual environmental characteristics, their combined effects are not a priori evident due to a wide range of non-linear interactions in the processing of sensory cues. As a result, it is currently not known how different environmental characteristics should be combined to effectively induce desired emotional and behavioral effects. To gain more insight into this matter, we performed a literature review on the emotional effects of multisensory stimulation. Although we found some interesting mechanisms, the outcome also reveals that empirical evidence is still scarce and haphazard. To stimulate further discussion and research, we propose a conceptual framework that describes how environmental interventions are likely to affect human emotional responses. This framework leads to some critical research questions that suggest opportunities for further investigation
The Nightmare of Dream Advertising
Advertisers are attempting to market to us while we dream. This is not science fiction, but rather a troubling new reality. Using a technique dubbed âtargeted dream incubationâ (TDI), companies have begun inserting commercial messages into peopleâs dreams. Roughly, TDI works by: (1) creating an association during waking life using sensory cues (for example, a pairing of sounds, visuals, or scents); and (2) as the subject is drifting off to sleep, the association is again introduced with the goal of triggering related dreams with related subject matter. Based on a 2021 American Marketing Association survey, 77 percent of 400 companies surveyed plan to experiment with dream advertisingâor what this Article calls âbranding dreamsââby 2025.
As a therapeutic technique, TDI is being found by sleep and dream researchers to have various benefits such as improving sleep quality, stimulating creativity, and treating addiction. However, when advertisers hijack TDI for commercial purposes, serious harms emerge. These harms are most apparent when the practice of branding dreams is employed in connection with addictive products. But health, privacy, liberty, economic, and cultural concerns also exist more broadly. In fact, dozens of sleep and dream researchers have signed an open letter calling for ânew protective policiesâ regarding dream advertising, lest âdreams become just another playground for corporate advertisers.â
Such specifically tailored regulations may be welcome and helpful. However, this Article suggests thatâat least in certain instancesâ the practice of branding dreams might already run afoul of existing advertising regulations. To this end, the Article advances two claims. First, dream advertising appears to fit the definition of subliminal messaging: advertisements âexisting or functioning below the threshold of consciousness.â Second, particularly if dream advertising is considered a novel method of subliminal advertising, some forms of dream advertising may be ripe for enforcement as âdeceptive acts or practicesâ under Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Act
Information Olfactation: Theory, Design, and Evaluation
Olfactory feedback for analytical tasks is a virtually unexplored area in spite of the advantages it offers for information recall, feature identification, and location detection. Here we introduce the concept of âInformation Olfactationâ as the fragrant sibling of information visualization, and discuss how scent can be used to convey data. Building on a review of the human olfactory system and mirroring common visualization practice, we propose olfactory marks, the substrate in which they exist, and their olfactory channels that are available to designers. To exemplify this idea, we present âviScent(1.0)â: a six-scent stereo olfactory display capable of conveying olfactory glyphs of varying temperature and direction, as well as a corresponding software system that integrates the display with a traditional visualization display. We also conduct a comprehensive perceptual experiment on Information Olfactation: the use of olfactory marks and channels to convey data. More specifically, following the example from graphical perception studies, we design an experiment that studies the perceptual accuracy of four ``olfactory channels''---scent type, scent intensity, airflow, and temperature---for conveying three different types of data---nominal, ordinal, and quantitative. We also present details of an advanced 24-scent olfactory display: âviScent(2.0)â and its software framework that we designed in order to run this experiment. Our results yield a ranking of olfactory channels for each data type that follows similar principles as rankings for visual channels, such as those derived by Mackinlay, Cleveland & McGill, and Bertin
Multimodality in VR: A survey
Virtual reality (VR) is rapidly growing, with the potential to change the way we create and consume content. In VR, users integrate multimodal sensory information they receive, to create a unified perception of the virtual world. In this survey, we review the body of work addressing multimodality in VR, and its role and benefits in user experience, together with different applications that leverage multimodality in many disciplines. These works thus encompass several fields of research, and demonstrate that multimodality plays a fundamental role in VR; enhancing the experience, improving overall performance, and yielding unprecedented abilities in skill and knowledge transfer
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Opportunities for olfactory interaction in an automotive context
Driving is a highly visual task. Nevertheless, it is a process that involves other senses as well. When we drive, we touch the steering wheel; we listen to what is happening around us, and, even if we are not paying attention to that, we smell what is happening with the car or around it. A scent of gasoline, the burning rubber, the plastic heated up by the sunlight - these are just a few examples. Smell is a very important sense for driving, though it has not been studied much in this context [85], despite being able to provide a much more vivid experience than any other human sense [80]. This thesis aims to fill this gap by investigating opportunities for olfactory interaction in an automotive context. The thesis is mainly focused on designing a scent-delivery device suitable for in-car interaction, on the topic of delivering driving-relevant notifications using scents, and on studying the effects scents have on the driving performance and behaviour, as well as the driverâs mood and well-being. This paper-style PhD thesis consists of two parts. Part II is a collection of seven published papers written in the scope of this thesis, and Part I describes how these papers build a coherent story. Part I starts with an introduction (see Chapter 1) that covers the research questions and contributions of the thesis. It continues with a summary of the background research (see Chapter 2). This overview part then moves on to the description of the approach (see Chapter 3) that covers the process of designing the scent delivery device, the olfactory interaction space, and the studies conducted throughout this PhD. Chapter 4 then summarises the core findings of each study, which are finally discussed in Chapter 5. Part I finishes with a conclusion (see Chapter 6)
Smells, well-being and the built environment
In this Research Topic, we aimed to collect a range of contributions to understand the emotional and wellbeing responses resulting from smells in different public spaces (museums, highstreets, heritage buildings, food districts, neighborhoods, squares, etc.) to inform future spatial design and management. The articles in this Research Topic are presented according to three types of contributions: reviews and conceptual analyses, empirical research in fieldwork, in laboratory studies and technological applications.
Reviews and Conceptual Analyses
Xiao et al. reviewed smellscape research studies conducted in the past 10 years to identify the challenges and related areas of future research, namely smell archives and databases, social justice within odor control and management, and research into advanced building materials. Spence reviewed the changing role of smells in the built environment from negative associations with sanitation to meaningful personal and cultural associations with memories and experiences which led to an evaluation of different approaches in examining the impact of smells on people's mood or wellbeing and the challenges of researching smells in the multi-sensory environment.
Moving from the sick building sydrome to sick transport sydrome, Spence further reviewed the smells in transport environments as aesthetic and functional, and suggests challenges for future transportation to produce a more tangible vision to integrate smells in the design process to achieve the right balance of olfactory stimulation. Looking backwards to scented past, Bembibre and StrliÄ make the case for the need of knowledge exchange and interdisciplinary interpretation of findings in the field of olfactory heritage, providing an overview of methodological and museal studies as well as challenges associated with historical scent reconstruction.
Empirical Research - Fieldwork
PĂĄlsdĂłttir et al. carried out a field study with participants suffering from stress-related mental disorders and explored how they would describe their smellscape perception of a garden in the context of a nature-based rehabilitation intervention. In a different field study, de Groot investigated whether ambient scents could affect customers' subjective experience and spending behavior in an experiment with customers of a second-hand clothing store. The author concluded that for that to happen, the smellscape should have a meaningful link to the physical context. Masaoka et al. present the results of a study conducted to examine whether continuous odor stimuli associated with autobiographical memories could activate olfactory areas in the brain of older adults and assess whether this odor stimulation could have a protective effect against age-related cognitive decline.
Empirical Research - Laboratory Studies and Technological Applications
Masaoka et al. investigated the potential protective effect from age-related cognitive decline of continuous odor stimuli associated with autobiographical memories and whether those could activate the above olfactory areas in older adults. Jiang et al. used blood pressure, pulse rate, EEG, POMS, and SD data to examine the odor-visual effects of the Primula forbesii Franch compared with the non-fragrant Primula malacoides Franch on the physiological and psychological state of Chinese female college students in the indoor environment. Courrèges et al. examined the correlations between odor and texture in users' perceptions of cosmetic creams cross-culturally, in laboratory conditions, using questionnaires, minimizing the impacts of branded messages from the packing and retail spaces. Amores et al. discussed the design and technical implementation of Essence- a smartphone-controlled wearable device that monitors users' EEG and real-time sleep staging algorithm to release scents to interact with users- in home-based sleep environments.
The articles included in this Research Topic represent a nice balance between the theoretical reviews, empirical studies and laboratory research, showing the vibrance and dynamic in this research field as well as new technological developments such as extended reality, emotional sensors (i.e. EEG, GSR) and odor monitoring devices. New insights are drawn into the theoretical frameworks to understand relationships between smells, wellbeing and emotions, behaviors and physiological aspects; methodological approaches to measure smell triggered emotions, experiences, and quality of life; practical explorations on the process and challenges of using smells to influence user experiences in the built environment
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