A graspable olfactory display for virtual reality Niedenthal, Simon; Fredborg, William; Lundén, Peter ...
International journal of human-computer studies,
January 2023, 2023-01-00, 2023, Letnik:
169
Journal Article
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•We present a novel compact, low-cost olfactometer that is fitted to the hand controller of the HTC vive virtual reality (VR) system.•The olfactometer employs stepless valves to enable control of ...scent magnitude and blending. Our olfactometer allows for concealed (i.e., unknown to the user) combinations of odours with virtual objects and contexts, making it well suited to applications involving active sniffing and interrogation of objects in virtual space for recreational, scientific, or therapeutic functions.•We have utilized the opening in the HTC vive hand controller as a channel to output scent at the hand, linking physical smells to a synthetic VR environment.•Our device introduces proportional blending through stepless valves, allowing for the creation of more nuanced blends from a basic set of four available scents.•A gas sensor study indicates that the device captures many of the characteristics of high-end research olfactometers in a low-cost, handheld form factor.•A user study in a virtual wine cellar game demonstrates that the device is intuitive to use and stable enough for long-term smell training sessions.
The sense of smell, olfaction, is seldom engaged in digital interactive systems, but, supported by the proper technology, olfaction might open up new interaction domains. Human olfactory experience involves active exploration, directed sniffing and nuanced judgements about odour identity, concentrations, and blends, yet to date most compact olfactory displays do not directly support these experiences. We describe the development and validation of a compact, low-cost olfactory display fitted to the hand controller of the HTC Vive Virtual Reality (VR) system that employs stepless valves to enable control of scent magnitude and blending (Fig. 1). Our olfactory display allows for concealed (i.e., unknown to the user) combinations of odours with virtual objects and contexts, making it well suited to applications involving interactions with odorous objects in virtual space for recreational, educational, scientific, or therapeutic functions. Through a user study and gas sensor analysis, we have been able to demonstrate that our device presents clear and consistent scent output, is intuitive from a user perspective, and supports gameplay interactions. We present results from a smell training game in a virtual wine tasting cellar in which the initial task of identifying wine aroma components is followed by evaluating more complex blends, allowing the player to “level up” as they proceed to higher degrees of connoisseurship. Novice users were able to quickly adapt to the display, and we found that the device affords sniffing and other gestures that add verisimilitude to olfactory experience in virtual environments. Test-retest reliability was high when participants performed the task two times with the same odours. In sum, the results suggest our olfactory display may facilitate use in game settings and other olfactory interactions.
Echolocation is the detection and localization of objects by listening to the sounds they reflect. Early studies of human echolocation used real objects that the experimental leader positioned ...manually before each experimental trial. The advantage of this procedure is the use of realistic stimuli; the disadvantage is that manually shifting stimuli between trials is very time consuming making it difficult to use psychophysical methods based on the presentation of hundreds of stimuli. The present study tested a new automated system for stimulus presentation, the Echobot, that overcomes this disadvantage. We tested 15 sighted participants with no prior experience of echolocation on their ability to detect the reflection of a loudspeaker-generated click from a 50 cm circular aluminum disk. The results showed that most participants were able to detect the sound reflections. Performance varied considerably, however, with mean individual thresholds of detection ranging from 1 to 3.2 m distance from the disk. Three participants in the loudspeaker experiment also tested using self-generated vocalization. One participant performed better using vocalization and one much worse than in the loudspeaker experiment, illustrating that performance in echolocation experiments using vocalizations not only measures the ability to detect sound reflections, but also the ability to produce efficient echolocation signals. Overall, the present experiments show that the Echobot may be a useful tool in research on human echolocation.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
•Water sounds and ratings of soundscape quality were not directly related.•Using water sounds to mask road-traffic noise is not simple and straight forward.•Water sounds may affect the audibility of ...wanted as well as unwanted sounds.•Water features ought to be pre-tested before constructed.
A field experiment was conducted to explore whether water sounds from a fountain had a positive impact on soundscape quality in a downtown park. In total, 405 visitors were recruited to answer a questionnaire on how they perceived the park, including its acoustic environment. Meanwhile the fountain was turned on or off, at irregular hours. Water sounds from the fountain were not directly associated with ratings of soundscape quality. Rather, the predictors of soundscape quality were the variables “Road-traffic noise” and “Other natural sounds”. The former had a negative and the latter a positive impact. However, water sounds may have had an indirect impact on soundscape quality by affecting the audibility of road-traffic and natural sounds. The present results, obtained in situ, agree with previous results in soundscape research that the sounds perceived—particularly roadtraffic and natural sounds—explain soundscape quality. They also agree with the results from laboratory studies that water sounds may mask road-traffic sounds, but that this is not simple and straight forward. Thus sound should be brought into the design scheme when introducing water features in urban open spaces, and their environmental impact must be thoroughly assessed empirically.
Crossings and Crosses Jenny Berglund, Thomas Lundén, Peter Strandbrink / Jenny Berglund, Thomas Lundén, Peter Strandbrink
2015, 2015-05-19, Letnik:
63
eBook
Dealing with different regions and cases, the contributions in this volume address and critically explore the theme of borders, educations, and religions in northern Europe. As shown in different ...ways, and contrary to popular ideas, there seems to be little reason to believe that religious and civic identity formation through public education is becoming less parochial and more culturally open. Even where state borders are porous, where commerce, culture, and trade as well as associative, personal, and social life display stronger liminal traits, normative education remains surprisingly national. This situation is remarkable and goes against the grain of current notions of both accelerating globalisation and a European regional renaissance. The book also takes issue with the foundational tenet that liberal democracies are by definition uninvolved in matters concerning faith and belief. Instead, an implied conclusion is that secular liberal democracy is less than secular and liberal - at least in education, which is a major arena for political- cultural-ethical socialisation, as it aims to confer worldviews and frameworks of identity on young people who will eventually become full citizens and bearers/sharers of prevailing normative communities.
Abstract
Visual stimuli often dominate nonvisual stimuli during multisensory perception. Evidence suggests higher cognitive processes prioritize visual over nonvisual stimuli during divided ...attention. Visual stimuli should thus be disproportionally distracting when processing incongruent cross-sensory stimulus pairs. We tested this assumption by comparing visual processing with olfaction, a “primitive” sensory channel that detects potentially hazardous chemicals by alerting attention. Behavioral and event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were assessed in a bimodal object categorization task with congruent or incongruent odor–picture pairings and a delayed auditory target that indicated whether olfactory or visual cues should be categorized. For congruent pairings, accuracy was higher for visual compared to olfactory decisions. However, for incongruent pairings, reaction times (RTs) were faster for olfactory decisions. Behavioral results suggested that incongruent odors interfered more with visual decisions, thereby providing evidence for an “olfactory dominance” effect. Categorization of incongruent pairings engendered a late “slow wave” ERP effect. Importantly, this effect had a later amplitude peak and longer latency during visual decisions, likely reflecting additional categorization effort for visual stimuli in the presence of incongruent odors. In sum, contrary to what might be inferred from theories of “visual dominance,” incongruent odors may in fact uniquely attract mental processing resources during perceptual incongruence.
Water fountains are potential tools for soundscape improvement, but little is known about their perceptual properties. To explore this, sounds were recorded from 32 fountains installed in urban ...parks. The sounds were recorded with a sound-field microphone and were reproduced using an ambisonic loudspeaker setup. Fifty-seven listeners assessed the sounds with regard to similarity and pleasantness. Multidimensional scaling of similarity data revealed distinct groups of soft variable and loud steady-state sounds. Acoustically, the soft variable sounds were characterized by low overall levels and high temporal variability, whereas the opposite pattern characterized the loud steady-state sounds. The perceived pleasantness of the sounds was negatively related to their overall level and positively related to their temporal variability, whereas spectral centroid was weakly correlated to pleasantness. However, the results of an additional experiment, using the same sounds set equal in overall level, found a negative relationship between pleasantness and spectral centroid, suggesting that spectral factors may influence pleasantness scores in experiments where overall level does not dominate pleasantness assessments. The equal-level experiment also showed that several loud steady-state sounds remained unpleasant, suggesting an inherently unpleasant sound character. From a soundscape design perspective, it may be advisable to avoid fountains generating such sounds.
Studies of effects on speech intelligibility from aircraft noise in outdoor places are currently lacking. To explore these effects, first-order ambisonic recordings of aircraft noise were reproduced ...outdoors in a pergola. The average background level was 47 dB LA eq. Lists of phonetically balanced words (LAS max,word = 54 dB) were reproduced simultaneously with aircraft passage noise (LAS max,noise = 72-84 dB). Twenty individually tested listeners wrote down each presented word while seated in the pergola. The main results were (i) aircraft noise negatively affects speech intelligibility at sound pressure levels that exceed those of the speech sound (signal-to-noise ratio, S/N < 0), and (ii) the simple A-weighted S/N ratio was nearly as good an indicator of speech intelligibility as were two more advanced models, the Speech Intelligibility Index and Glasberg and Moore's J. Audio Eng. Soc. 53, 906-918 (2005) partial loudness model. This suggests that any of these indicators is applicable for predicting effects of aircraft noise on speech intelligibility outdoors.
The amount of noise in urban settings is steadily on the rise, creating a potential health hazard and causing a general nuisance. In major European cities, noise levels are so high that the majority ...of urban parks can no longer truly serve as recreational environments, a problem the World Health Organization and the European Union are attempting to address. This study explores various strategies that promote the sustainable development of urban soundscapes at locations meant for rest, recreation, and social interaction. Further, we look at how people are affected by the combined effects of traffic and nature sounds in parks and other outdoor settings. To this end, we adopted a new track — the use of interdisciplinary methodology — that brings together architectural analysis, artistic experiments, and psychoacoustic methodology to evaluate the aesthetic, emotional, perceptual, and spatial effects of noise on subjects spending time in public open-air spaces. We conducted a large-scale case study at a city park to explore whether subjects were affected by purposely distributed sounds and, if so, how. The working hypothesis was that it is possible to cancel out or mute traffic noise by affecting individuals' aural perceptions using a process known as informational masking. Our long-term objective is to create a scientific foundation for action plans, both preemptive and troubleshooting, targeting noise reduction in parks and similar public spaces that are meant to provide a relaxing environment.
We describe a class of olfactory displays located at the hand, well-suited to support exploratory and active smelling behavior. We have developed a handheld olfactory display for the HTC Vive VR ...environment, and validated it in a two-step method that combines qualitative user evaluation with an empirical task-based study. The results of our qualitative study suggest that handheld olfactory displays may enhance a sense of presence in virtual environments. Our validation method is suitable for testing instruments that engage novel forms of smell interaction, and seek to provide clear and consistent output for empirically-validated olfactory research.
This paper will discuss the use of psychoacoustic evaluation as a tool for optimization of the soundscape simulator developed in the Listen project. The listen project is a three-year research ...project focused around developing a demonstrator, which auralizes the sound environment produced by road and railway traffic. The resolution of the parameter space of the simulator heavily influences the performance of the simulator. The perceptual resolution of the parameter space is investigated and the resolution is adjusted accordingly. The most important parameter is velocity. Adjustments of the resolution of this parameter alone gives a 60% reduction of the usage of memory.
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