Could Olfactory Displays Improve Data Visualization?

  • Authors:
  • Donald A. Washburn;Lauriann M. Jones

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • Computing in Science and Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Smell (olfaction) can be critical to our daily living--for example, smelling smoke from a fire in time to leave a burning building--but it is seldom used in data visualizations or virtual reality (VR) systems. Could olfaction augment data visualization, that is, could the use of visualization to communicate information relevant to many fields (from the ScenxWare Scent Design Studio white paper, www.trisenx.com/senxwhitepaperrev3.0.x.pdf)? Perhaps incorporating underutilized modalities--for example, haptics (touch), olfaction, and gustation (taste)--as data visualization aids is the next logical step to optimizing human information processing.