That Scent Evokes an Image—On the Impact of Olfactory Cues on User Image Recall in Digital Multisensory Environments

Copyright © 2023 The Author(s). In traditional digital filing systems, people mostly use text as a key to categorise images, and retrieve them in the future. The use of other media as keys for image retrieval is rarely used, notwithstanding that multisensory digital media – mulsemedia – can be harnessed to improve users’ performance and help them to retrieve their images. In this respect, olfactory media (engaging the sense of smell) is an example, as people can categorise their images by using congruent olfactory media. Accordingly, we investigated the impact of employing olfactory media as a key for retrieving a set of images. Moreover, we also studied the impact of the usage of olfactory media in this context on a user’s performance and Quality of Experience (QoE). To this end, we developed an olfactory-enhanced application (SCENT2IMAGE) in which olfactory media was emitted alongside a 5X5 matrix of images, of which users had to recognize 4 images congruent with the emitted scents. Furthermore, we developed a word-only version of the application (WORD2IMAGE) in which words alone were used as an equivalent key instead of olfactory media. Forty-four participants were invited and took part in our experiment, evenly split into a control and experimental group. Results highlight that using olfactory media does have a significant impact on user performance by helping them find related images. Moreover, using olfactory effects in this context was also found to enhance user QoE. Lastly, our findings underscore that users were willing to use olfactory-enhanced applications for categorizing/retrieving their albums and images...

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 ‘lower’ 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 – this is what we call ‘the fundamental attribution error’. 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

A tutorial for olfaction-based multisensorial media application design and evaluation

© ACM, 2017. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in PUBLICATION, {VOL50, ISS5, September 2017} https://doi.org/10.1145/310824

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 ‘Information Olfactation’ 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 ‘viScent(1.0)’: 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: ‘viScent(2.0)’ 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