FURI | Fall 2020

Standardizing Evaluation of Human-Computer Interaction in VR Olfactory Applications

Olfactory appeals in virtual reality (VR) systems create more immersive experiences ideal for medical, military, and extreme environment training. However, smell is still rather underdeveloped compared to visual, auricular, and haptic functions in VR because scents are complex in their chemical composition and relation to human emotion, spatial characteristics, and timing. This research project strives to help simplify the complexity by curating suggested criteria, such as subjective descriptions of olfactory experiences, for evaluating human-computer interaction (HCI) in smell applications, providing researchers and multimedia content creators in the community a standardized means to measure the effectiveness of their designs.