The Impact of Employing Olfactory Media in a Digital Context - a User Performance and Quality of Experience perspective

Abstract

Relatively few studies have been conducted exploring the use of olfactory media as a source of information in a digital context from a computer vision perspective, although other traditional media have been employed effectively in different applications. In the study underpinning this thesis, we investigate the impact of olfactory media in a digital context on a user’s performance and quality of experience (QoE). Also, we aim at identifying best practices for integrating olfactory media with other digital media such as text, images, and audio. Thus, the main hypothesis in this study is that the olfactory media can be utilised in a digital context to act as cues enabling information retrieval in the form of words, images or congruent information regarding places. To this end, we conducted an experimental work to test this hypothesis. Accordingly, we developed three olfactoryenhanced applications in which the olfactory media was utilised as a retrieval key. The rationale behind conducting the experimental work was to evaluate these applications and collect the data required for measuring the users’ performance. As regards QoE, we used a questionnaire to measure the factors that influence users such as congruency, olfactory media characteristics and their effects. A total of 158 participants were recruited in our experiments, evenly split into a control and experimental group. The findings have shown that there is a significant opportunity to benefit from olfactory media in the digital context, and to develop olfactory-enhanced applications in different aspects. Also, we found that user performance and QoE are improved when olfactory media are present, either separately or integrated with other media such as images and words; Moreover, users were passionate about engaging with enhanced olfactory applications in the future. Accordingly, the main contributions of this thesis is that it underlines the advantages of employing olfactory media in a digital context through innovative applications, as well as those of integrating olfactory media with other traditional digital media, and, in so doing, we investigate the impact of olfactory media on users’ performance and QoE.