- My name is Dmitrijs, I'm happy to continue this
SCHI Lab sub-session in this conference.
(hoot from audience) (speaker chuckles)
Thank you, thank you.
I will be talking about the exploration of olfactory
interaction spaces and when I talk about smell,
which I do a lot, people always say, "Well, don't just
talk about smell, but give us something to smell".
So actually I brought a small bottle with me which one
of the student volunteers will pass around so that you can
sniff some relaxing smell and chill while I am talking.
(audience laughs)
Alright, so the natural question that arises is
why to use smell?
Well, smell is a very strong medium.
It has a very powerful link to our emotions and memories,
and of course it's very complicated to apply because of
a number of issues, but, yeah, that's what I'm here for,
to tell you how to work with smell and HCI.
Yeah, and actually when I started working with olfactory
interaction, um, I was very much lost because there's not
only very little research about this topic, but also
everyone tends to do it in their own way and, um,
for their very specific prototypes and no one seems to be
tackling the problem as such.
So, how to tackle the problem of olfactory interaction?
And that has, what has motivated me to work on this
research activity.
So I looked up what is available on the topic of olfactory
interaction spaces and I realized that the most common
problems are the, uh,
the contamination
because if we use the
building's centralized ventilation system, then basically
the whole building would stink at some point,
and also the materials tend to absorb scents
which is not what we want to have.
If we want to apply smell in HCI, we of course, need a
device which would deliver the scents to the user,
and,
and while going through different prototypes
I have extracted some
characteristics that a scent-delivery device
should have, and the first, well, one of the most important
ones is the delivery distance.
So, the smell has to travel across a certain distance so
that we have freedom of hand movements in front of us
and we can actually do something meaningful with the
prototype.
And, for example, here on the left we can see that the
the distance that is used is not feasible for many
applications for us.
On the example on the right there is plenty of space not
only for hand, but the whole body movements.
Another
thing that is important is to keep the scent
channels isolated from each other in order to exclude the
cross-contamination of the, of the scents.
On the left you can see the, not the Aroma Shooter but
the Dale Air Vortex
um, device.
It does have four separate scent channels, but they are
not completely isolated from each other, so the scent
molecules can go outside the tubes even if the device is off
and then mix with each other, so it's very hard to get a
clean scent out.
But in the example of Nakamoto, she was using plastic tubes
for every scent channel which basically excluded
cross-contamination issues.
Then another important aspect is the control of the blowing
time and scent intensity and there are devices with APIs
which are offering that.
For example, the Aroma Shooter which is on the left.
So, the device comes with an API which enables this
functionality and there are also more sophisticated
devices used in olfactory studies.
And, finally, um, in olfactory HCI,
we don't want the user just
to receive just one smell all the time because it's
very hard to do interaction with one smell,
so there is a need to have multiple scents within one
session and also to exchange them between the sessions.
And on the right we can see a device which is,
which contains six scent cartridges whereas on the left
there is a device with only one scent cartridge.
So, now I went through a number of different recommendations
on what a scent-delivery device and an olfactory
interactions space should have,
And, um,
in my proposal I have summarized them all
by
writing down the Ospace framework,
which basically is a set of recommendations on how to tackle
the problem of olfactory interaction.
And, based on this framework, we have built our own
scent-delivery device
We have used an air tank, a tank of compressed air, which
would split the airflow in six channels,
and the using electric valves, controlled by an
Arduino board we could
precisely trigger the,
the moment when the clean air flows into one of the six
scent, um
containers
and then this smell
is traveling
to the user's nose.
And this is how the prototype looked in real life,
so on the left you can see the air tank that
I have mentioned and the actual device with six scent
containers which are glass jars, and the the electric valves
on the top.
And, on the right we can see the output nozzle, which is
basically collecting the six scent tubes together for the
output.
And, this is how we, how we developed our olfactory
interaction room.
It's actually a room in the room, with it's own
ventilation system, which I have said is an issue when
working with smells.
There are two air extractors located outside and also
a clean-air blower.
The device itself is also located outside the room,
and only the scent-delivery tubes and the extraction pipe
are going inside the room.
And for the experiment we have set-up a chair and a table
inside and in order to keep the participants have constant
across the trials and across the experiments,
we have used a chin-rest.
You can see that the nozzle was located in front of the
user's nose.
This is how the room looked from outside.
We have used a black, odorless, water-repellent fabric
to cover the room.
And the room itself is a former clean room which is made
out of plastic and metals; so, again, materials that
do not absorb scents.
We conducted a user-study with this set-up to see
how it works.
We have done a mixed-model study with 21 participants.
We have studied the different scents and different dilution
levels as in within participant's condition,
and the air pressure was explored between participants
because our current set-up did not enable air pressure
changes within the session.
This is how the set-up looked inside the room
with a participant inside.
So, basically you can see the blue nozzle pointing towards
the participant's nose, and there was a screen on the left
where the graphical user-interface was displayed.
We basically asked the user to press the Start button when
they started perceiving a scent,
and they had to click Stop when they didn't perceive the
smell, the scent, anymore, and we were
recording these times.
So we realized, we found out that basically any of the
scents that we have explored could be detected within,
within 10 seconds
and also it took just as much as, or as little as,
nine seconds for the scent to disappear.
Which is of course not fast enough for real-time
applications,
but there is still a range of different application
possibilities where this time is feasible.
For example, we can think of the olfactory-feedback
notifications, or multisensory cinema, where the transitions
between the scenes are smooth enough
to let the scent disappear and release another one.
Our results suggest that there might, that the detection
and the lingering time of the scent might not depend on
the scent type, but of course, we need to study it with
a bigger sample size.
And we can see that lingering is not always a problem,
so in our case the smell did go away in nine seconds,
whereas in many other pieces of research, I have seen
in the related work, lingering was addressed as a big issue.
So, it's there; you cannot fight it, and it's a limitation.
In this conference, we'll only speak about the applications.
So we did not just study the set-up, in one of our next
studies we actually applied this knowledge to build
a olfaction-enhanced trial stimulator.
I will not talk about it much today because it is a
different paper, but just to give you an idea of how
to use this in practice.
So to conclude,
we can say that smell, as we can see,
can be useful from HCI.
We cannot only talk about limitations of scent
cross-contamination and lingering artifacts.
If we take a good
control over parameters,
if we can keep the scent channels isolated from each other
and we release just a small amount of the odorant then, um
we can achieve meaningful interaction and the user would not
be confused by some previous scent which is still in the
room at the moment the next scent is coming in.
So this is possible.
And, um,
what I actually am really happy about in relation to
this research is that we're doing the initial steps towards
a common design framework which is a problem in
olfactory HCI so far, and I hope that if you decide
to work with olfactory interaction, you take this as
a starting point and you extend this and contribute to this
framework as well, so that someday
we have an olfactory interaction standard,
so that no other researcher is lost as me two years ago
and can actually refer to something which is common for
everyone.
With this positive take-home message I close,
and I thank you for your attention.
(audience clapping)
- [Male Voice] (not discernible)
- [Male Audience Member] Hi, thanks.
So I wanted to ask, um, similar to how we sometimes get
immune to vibrations or haptic feedback, that I guess,
happens more with smell or taste, um, do you,
do you have any thoughts on that?
- Yeah, a very good question.
So in olfaction, in olfactory studies we have the problem of
habituation, also referred to as um,
as adaptation,
so if we are exposed to a smell for a long time then on some
point we don't notice it anymore and our olfactory function
is numb, so to say.
It is an issue indeed, but there has been research done on
that proving that if we release the scent in small chunks
in the periods of, say, 30 seconds, then this is
not the case; there is enough time for the olfactory
function to refresh and the habituation is not happening.
And in fact, in my study, I also made sure that the gaps
between the stimuli are long enough for participants to
not develop habituation.
- [Female Audience Member] Thank you, very interesting work.
I have a couple of questions.
One is, I guess, the potential health impact olfactory.
I know in know in Canada there is a lot of move towards
scent-free buildings and things given environmental
allergies, so what's the general consensus in the field
about that?
- Mm. Yeah, very good question; thank you.
In fact, I have to go through at least, like three
iterations of Ethics Approval until this got through.
Yes, uh,
the sense of smell is a chemical sense, of uh, it's,
um, there is a risk of allergies, indeed.
So, so far we just taking scents which are approved, which
are known not to cause allergies and we also
ask every participant if they have strong reactions to
smells, any allergies, and only if this is not the case
then we proceed.
But, yeah, I also hope that Chemistry will progress
designing smells which are good for everyone.
- [Female Audience Member] Are we out of time, David?
I have a different question.
- [Male Voice] (not discernible)
- [Female Audience Member] Does anyone else have a question?
Um, so, two years ago I had a major house fire,
and through that experience I learned that people have
very different sensitivities to smell.
So, we're very good at smelling smoke now.
And, that's not the case for lots of people.
And, so, how do you deal with that?
How do you even measure someone's, just, you know,
do they have a good nose or not?
- That's a very good question.
It is indeed very hard to generalize when studying
olfactory function.
Well we, we have self-report question, where we ask
participants to rate their sensitivity to olfactory stimuli
and, yeah, mostly people say that they are good and
that their results do not deviate from the mean much.
So, this is how we deal with it so far, but, um,
it's indeed a problem, yes.
There is much more variability than in visual studies
for sure, yeah.