Andrea Batch
University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA
Olfaction---the sense of smell---is one of the least explored of the human senses for conveying abstract information. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive perceptual experiment on information olfactation: the use of olfactory and cross-modal sensory 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 cross-modal sensory channels---scent type, scent intensity, airflow, and temperature---for conveying three different types of data---nominal, ordinal, and quantitative. We also present details of a 24-scent multi-sensory display and its software framework that we designed in order to run this experiment. Our results yield a ranking of olfactory and cross-modal sensory channels that follows similar principles as classic rankings for visual channels.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376733
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2020.acm.org/)