Smell (intro)

The lecture was mostly an overview of the paper “The Skin Games: Fragrant Play, Scented Media and the Stench of Digital Games”[1], which I had already read before the first day. I cannot really think of anything new that came up in the lecture itself only, but one general point is the fact that scent has been used in a lot of domains in many ways, and it is quite strange to me that they have not continued the paths. A lot of people and even companies seem to mock this idea of having smell in the digital world. It makes me wonder about the reason of this. Is it because smell is so different than the other senses like sight and hearing? Is it the difficulty of implementing and integrating it in the digital devices? Or is it just a “stereotype” that smell is just not necessary or sometimes even bad in some situations? The nature of smell, of course, is not so controllable and its chemical characteristic (when it comes to the human’s body receiving it), maybe makes the whole idea invasive for some people? Is it our underused sense of smell?

I also read another paper by Olofsson et al. (2017) [2], that was changed last minute, but it was about smell training. The thing I was wondering about is the smell training concept and how they use smells and their names to make people’s noses more and more familiar with the smells. What I am not sure of is whether, in this process of training, it is the actual sense of smell that is improving in identifying the actual particles of smell, or it is the association of whatever the smell is, with the name of it in the mind of the trainee that is being strengthened. Another similar question is: is the sense of smell actually getting better at identifying all the smells in this process, or is it just getting better at identifying that specific smell. This is more of a scientific question that, if relevant, might need actual scientific studies on it.

Seminar

It was interesting to have a seminar discussing the papers we have read with the author himself. We were able to ask questions about the content of the papers, especially the ones that were not clear enough.

One of the terms whose meaning was given emphasis to, was “immersion”. It was discussed that in the paper “A Handheld Olfactory Display for Smell-Enabled VR Games” by Niedenthal et al. (2019) [3], this word is referring to the “sensory experience” of the user.

References:

[1] Niedenthal, S. (2012). The Skin Games: Fragrant Play, Scented Media and the Stench of Digital Games. In Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture, 6(1).

[2] Olofsson, J. K., Niedenthal, S., Ehrndal, M., Zakrzewska, M., Wartel, A., Larsson, M. (2017). Beyond Smell-O-Vision: Possibilities for Smell-Based Digital Media. Simulation & Gaming, 48(4), 455–479.

[3] Niedenthal, S., Lundén, P., Ehrndal, M., Olofsson, J. K. (2019). A Handheld Olfactory Display for Smell-Enabled VR Games. In IEEE International Symposium on Olfaction and Electronic Nose (ISOEN).