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.

There has been a monumental push from the CHI community to bring more human senses to interactive devices. This trend is significant because we use all our senses in everyday interactions but only an extremely narrow subset when interacting with computers. This workshop focuses on bringing together researchers to advance some of the most challenging senses to embed into interfaces, but arguably the most exciting: smell, taste, and temperature. To integrate these modalities into interfaces, researchers not only use methods from traditional mechanics or haptics (e.g., pumps, heating pads, etc.) but must also acquire tacit skills and understandings from psychophysics, neuroscience, anatomy, and chemistry (e.g., receptor signaling pathways or food chemistry). This demo-based workshop provides a platform to come together and bring their demonstrations, experiments, and hardware to experience, discuss, and advance the field.  

There are currently few ways to reliably and objectively assess olfaction outside of the research laboratory or clinic. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for remote olfactory assessment; in particular, smell training at home is a promising method for olfactory rehabilitation, but further methodological advances might enhance its effectiveness and range of use. Here, we present Exerscent, a portable, low-cost olfactory display designed primarily for uses outside of the laboratory and that can be operated with a personal computer. Exerscent includes Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags that are attached to odor stimuli and read with a MFRC522 module RFID reader/antenna that encodes the odor in order to provide adaptive challenges for the user (e.g., an odor identification task). Hardware parts are commercially available or 3D printed. Instructions and code for building the Exerscent are freely available online (https://osf.io/kwftm/). As a proof of concept, we present a case study in which a participant trained daily to identify 54 odors, improving from 81% to 96% accuracy over 16 consecutive days. In addition, results from a laboratory experiment with 11 volunteers indicated a very high level of perceived usability and engagement. Exerscent may be used for olfactory skills development (e.g., perfumery, enology), and rehabilitation purposes (e.g., postviral olfactory loss), but it also allows for other forms of technological interactions such as olfactory-based recreational interactions.

Although prior studies have shown sensory benefits of smell training, they are limited by the lack of technologies that enable training with performance feedback in domestic settings. Current research olfactometer designs prioritize the output of carefully controlled scent concentrations at a predictable onset, at the expense of size and portability. Here we present a portable olfactory display designed primarily for uses outside of the laboratory and that can be operated with a personal computer.

We employ RFID tags as a means of linking individual scent units to a database, as part of a training regimen that is easy to learn, easy to maintain, and scalable. These tags can be attached to any set of scent vials. Our hybrid digital/physical platform for conducting olfactory research combines the benefits of a digital, interactive platform—including the ability to monitor subject performance, logging and archiving experimental data—with scent delivery units under control of the user.

A pilot study included a participant training to identify 48 wine aromas (from the commercially available Le Nez du Vin set) using a multiple-choice format with feedback. Through brief daily training sessions at home, an improvement from 81% to 96% correct responses was observed in 16 days, offering proof of principle. We will describe how our hybrid platform can be useful for flexible olfactory assessment and training outside of a laboratory setting, and create new opportunities for employing digital environments in the service of olfactory research.

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.

Research Problem: The purpose of this research synthesis is to identify new opportunities for smell-enabled games based upon current olfactory research, and to present early game concepts that have emerged from our empirical assessments. Literature Review: We briefly summarize key projects in the history of scent technologies for film and media. Human-Computer Interaction researchers have also explored a number of uses for scent delivery in interactive digital media. Recent developments in olfactory psychology and neuroscience research suggest that a fruitful avenue for exploration is to develop learning games that expand olfactory capacity. Methodology: We have conducted two studies of computer-based perceptual and cognitive olfactory tasks. 1. Mixture perception experiment: We designed a perceptual experiment where the task was to correctly estimate the intensity of odor components in a blend of coffee and tea. Blended odors were presented to 10 healthy adults by means of a computer-controlled olfactometer. Following each stimulation, the participant used a computer interface to estimate the intensity of components of the blend. 2. Event-based memory experiment: We have developed a digital olfactory version of the children's game "Memory." The game interface consists of 32 white squares that are presented in a grid pattern on the screen and that, when participants click on them, triggers the release of one of eight possible smells from the olfactometer. Fifteen healthy adult participants were tested in 10 laboratory sessions distributed over three weeks. Results and Conclusions: Our empirical results suggest that smell training through learning games holds promise as a means of improving cognitive function. The results of our event-based memory experiment suggest that both olfactory and visual memory capacities might have benefitted from olfactory game training. The results of our mixture perception experiment indicate that binary odor mixtures might provide a suitable starting point for perceptual training, and we suggest that a smell-enabled game might include adaptive difficulty by progressively introducing more complex mixtures. We have used event-based memory and mixture perception as "olfactory targets" for game mechanic development, and present early design concepts for "Smelly Genes" and "Scenter." Finally, we discuss future directions and challenges for this new, interdisciplinary research topic.

This study presents an argument in favor of using multiple theory triangulation (Mäyrä 2009) as a means of generating design heuristics and gameplay themes for engaging the sense of smell in games. The disciplines that are drawn upon include sensory psychology, sensory anthropology, literature, interaction design research and game studies. The physical and historical context of smell in games is sketched by considering the challenges of designing for the sense of smell, examining how different cultures have integrated smell into their lives and entertainment, analyzing the failures of scented filmic media, and surveying games in which smell has played a role: Leather Goddesses of Phobos (Infocom Inc. 1986), Leisure Suit Larry 7: Love for Sail! (Sierra On-Line Inc. 1996) and the Nordic live-action roleplaying game Dragonbane (Koljonen, Kuustie and Multamäki 2006). Rather than naïve immersion, in which smell merely confirms what is seen onscreen, this study seeks to root the future development of scented gameplay in Ermi and Mäyrä’s sensory, challenge-based and imaginative (SCI) model of immersion (2007), and draws upon design discourses related to the bodily and spatial uses of scent: perfume and incense. We can learn about how to effectively engage smell in games by examining the ways in which people have organized play around perfume and incense, from games that incorporate perfume themes (ranging from board games to Axe cologne advergames), to the playful behaviors of an online fragrance community (Basenotes.net). The results of this study include a provisional design heuristics for smell in games, as well as specific gameplay themes: Sillage: longing for the absent, Skin games: scent and intimacy and Abuse, power and transgression.

Fireworks in games translate the sensory power of a real-world aesthetic form to the realm of digital simulation and gameplay. Understanding the role of fireworks in games can best be pursued through through a threefold aesthetic perspective that focuses on the senses, on art, and on the aesthetic experience that gives pleasure through the player’s participation in the simulation, gameplay and narrative potentials of fireworks. In games ranging from Wii Sports and Fantavision, to Okami and Assassin’s Creed II, digital fireworks are employed as a light effect, and are also the site for gameplay pleasures that include design and performance, timing and rhythm, and power and awe. Fireworks also gain narrative significance in game forms through association with specific sequences and characters. Ultimately, understanding the role of fireworks in games provokes us to reverse the scrutiny, and to consider games as fireworks, through which we experience ludic festivity and voluptuous panic.

The experience of playing a survival horror game is marked by a sense of vulnerability and an ongoing effort to accommodate to unfolding events and environments. These qualities and tasks can be better understood by exploring the similarities between this genre of games and gothic literature, in which obscurity plays an important role in achieving the desired effect. The design and illumination of survival horror environments, such as those in the Resident Evil (Capcom) and Silent Hill (Konami) series, is key to achieving obscurity, and contemporary eyetracking technologies can help us differentiate the different types of obscurity provided by occlusion, atmosphere or darkness, and begin to grasp how they inflect the experience of fear.

Digital games are commonly described as phenomena that combine aesthetic, social and technological elements, yet our understanding of the aesthetic element of games and play is perhaps the least developed of all. All too often, an aesthetics perspective within game studies and design discourses is relegated to a marginal role, by conflating game aesthetics with graphics and “eye candy,” or by limiting aesthetic discussion to graphic style analysis or debates on the question “are games art?” Changing game technologies, as well as arguments from within philosophy, psychology, interaction design theory and cultural theory, call for us to examine the implicit and explicit assumptions we make when we write about aesthetics within game studies research, as a prelude to reclaiming a perspective that will allow us to better understand the way in which games function as sites for sensory and embodied play, creative activity and aesthetic experience.

Video game playing is becoming a predominant part of popular culture. Games, like Assassin’s Creed (Ubisoft, released 2007), The Sims (Maxis, released 2000), Guitar Hero (RedOctane, released 2005), and World of War Craft (Bilizzard, released 2004), have attracted players from many different cultures and age groups. In this paper, we propose that the experience of playing a video game, like Assassin’s Creed, is a personal experience shaped through one’s emotional values, expectations, knowledge, and attitudes as influenced by culture. As we set out to review the Assassin’s Creed game, we discovered that each one of us had a different experience with the game. In this paper, we draw on our Assassin’s Creed play sessions. This experience is shaped by our different cultural viewpoints, including Middle-Eastern and Western, as well as intellectual disciplinary backgrounds, which include architecture, theatre, and computer science. To Maha and Magy, for example, the game aroused many nostalgic feelings through its simulated Middle-Eastern cities, the use of Arabic words, accents and gestures, and the detailed Middle-Eastern architectural design. While such small details meant much when viewed by Maha and Magy, their values were different when viewed by Simon and David. To both Simon and David, the game play experience was heightened through the beautiful architectural detail and the use of the environment layout as a function of gameplay, such as the use of rooftops for platforming, fast movement and flying-like actions, and stealth. This collaborative game review suggests that a game is, in interesting ways, experienced and perceived differently by players from divergent cultural-linguistic situations.

A common feature of many digital games is that they are played in a simulated 3D environment, a game world. Simulated illumination is the lighting designed into a game world. This thesis explores the influence of simulated illumination in digital games upon the emotion and behavior of the player. It does so within the context of game aesthetics, building upon an understanding of games as having the potential to evoke an aesthetic experience that is deeply absorbing, is experienced as whole and coherent, evokes intense feelings or emotions, and engages a sense of “make believe.” A full account of how simulated illumination affects people is gained by tracing the contributions from media practice and real-space lighting, as well as taking into account the unique possibilities of interactive media. Based upon the rich set of lighting references and possibilities that are present in digital games, this thesis offers a taxonomy of influence of simulated illumination, which is organized such that it moves from progressively simple patterns and mechanisms that work without much player awareness, towards progressively greater complexity and consciousness of light qualities.The study of simulated illumination is complex, and best conducted within a transdisciplinary framework that includes three perspectives: empirical emotion research, investigation of the lighting attitudes of creative practitioners, and formal analysis of games with the aim of articulating their use qualities related to simulated illumination. The way in which a “triangulation” study could be structured is presented through the results of the two-year Shadowplay project, with specific reference to the effects of warm (reddish) and cool (bluish) simulated illumination upon the experience of gameplay. We learned that exposure to warm light in a game prototype created more positive affect and led to better performance, and uncovered an interesting correspondence in the lighting attitudes of creative practitioners, regarding the relatively attractive versus repulsive qualities of warm and cool illumination in game environments. The (sometimes inconsistent) results of the Shadowplay project are discussed with reference to the conception of “pleasure” as it is developed within phenomenological philosophy and hedonic psychology. Considered this way, simulated illumination can create “eliciting conditions” for more complex sequences of emotions that constitute game pleasures. Within a game, we respond emotionally to exposure to qualities of simulated illumination, based upon what we bring with us into the game (whether based upon tastes, attitudes related to genre, memories or more “hard-wired” responses to light). At the same time, we implicitly learn the significance of the illumination that we encounter through our activity in the game. This means that there is no simple mapping of illumination quality to emotional outcome. Rather, designers need to learn to manipulate the unique potentials of simulated illumination in relation to the other elements of the gameplay experience.

As a means of extending the significance of findings in experimental psychology and non-visual psychological lighting research to the digital game research, the present study was designed to investigate the impact of warm (reddish) and cool (bluish) simulated illumination in digital game world on game users’ affect and play performance. In line with some previous findings we predicted that lighting in a digital game world might, as in the real world, differently influence the non-visual psychological mechanisms of affect, which in turn might enhance/impair the players’ performance. It was shown that the players performed best/fastest in a game world lit with a warm (reddish) vs. cool (bluish) lighting. The former color of lighting compared to the latter one was also shown to induce the highest level of pleasantness in game users. According to a regression analysis, it was the level of pleasantness induced by the warm lighting that enhanced the players’ better performance in that digital game world. It was also shown that high as opposed to medium/low skill players engage almost 2.5 times more per week in game-playing. Given their skill, they performed significantly fastest and they felt significantly most calm and relaxed in doing that.

The proposed area of Documentation studies offers a useful framework for the consideration of transdisciplinary subjects that do not respond fully to critical theories currently prevailing in the humanities and social sciences. This paper will apply a documentation approach to the study of light by examining case studies drawn from theatre, architecture and computer science. Scholars, scientists and lighting practitioners create and employ documents that encode illumination knowledge, which can be understood as the manifestation, simulation or manipulation of light to a particular end. A model encompassing the human body in illuminated space will be suggested as a means of classification, and different document types will be interrogated to suggest the sort of visual arguments and artifacts that can be constructed to demonstrate and communicate illumination knowledge.

Lighting design is an important element of game design, due to its role in directing attention, providing visibility, establishing important information concerning period and time of day, influencing emotions, and affecting presence. The current lighting technique used within the game industry relies on static cinematic lighting design methods, which are inappropriate for gaming environments. Game environments are dynamic; therefore, a lighting design that accommodates to such changes is required. While dynamic lighting is feasible, the current state of lighting design theory and techniques do not incorporate dynamic lighting, and thus the aesthetic utility of dynamic lighting remains uncharted territory. This paper addresses this issue to provide a first step towards developing a lighting design theory appropriate for gaming environments. In this paper, we will outline several psychological and sensory effects of lighting and lighting movements. Based on analyses of movies and lighting design texts, we will present a collection of lighting methods and describe their use and impact. In addition, we will describe a case study of an informal experiment conducted as a pilot study to evaluate the aesthetic utility of dynamic lighting within a game. Finally, we will discuss lessons learned, and propose a plan for further research into the use of dynamic lighting within video games.

Game design, like gameplay, is situated. Though we find ourselves in a period of global growth and consolidation in the games industry, marked by broad changes in how design work is organized, our understanding of game design as it is currently practiced needs to be rooted in local contexts of production. One useful way to explore the situated-ness of game development is by tracing the implementation of playtesting of prototypes in game companies. The implementation of playtesting serves as an acknowledgement of the complexity of designing for the emergent properties of games, and also reveals attitudes towards the player. This case study of playtesting a real-time strategy (RTS) game under development at a Swedish game company is based upon observations of test sessions and interviews with employees from March 2006-February 2007. Specifically, this study will trace the various outcomes of a single game-balancing (“Sweetspot”) playtest conducted in March of 2006. This test serves as a locus of playtest meaning, and demonstrates that playtesting at the company is used to achieving clarity in the game design process, to support an evolutionary design methodology, and as a means of communicating the state of the game to outside actors. In short, playtesting has meaning in several contexts, both within and beyond the immediate design task at hand. Whether the results of a playtest session take the form of a numerical figure, a written report, or a fast scrawl in the lead designer’s notebook, they need to be interpreted carefully in the light of their complex nature.

Despite the fact that there are currently a number of enjoyable digital games in which light plays a key role, we lack a vocabulary with which to discuss simulated illumination in game worlds. An understanding of lighting practices in other media, such as 3d computer-generated animation and film, must be supplemented with an awareness of real-space disciplines if we are to grasp the complexity of the game lighting design task. But game design is more than a repository for existing lighting practices; the interactive nature of games allows for an extended range of visualization possibilities and a self-reflexive sensitivity to light to emerge, most clearly manifested in games described as “stealth,” and “survival-horror” games.

Computer-generated images have become commonplace in recent years; just as commonplace is the absence of rich and compelling illumination and surface defini- tion. The advent of radiosity rendering--which models light behavior much more ac- curately than existing rendering modes--signals a major advance in the capabilities of computer simulations. “Six St. Jeromes” is a digital recreation of a detail from a painting of St. Jerome in his study by Antonello da Messina from about 1460, and is comprised of six versions of the scene under different lighting conditions. Wil- liam Mitchell’s The Reconfigured Eye serves as inspiration for this project, specifi- cally the chapter in which he traces digital image synthesis from the simplest to the most complex with reference to the corresponding changes that occurred in paint- ing from the Renaissance to contemporary works. This project does not propose to “correct” da Messina’s original, or produce works of art that aspire to a com- parison; rather, “Six St. Jeromes” attempts to explore the behavior of light in an environment that was never built--a task uniquely well-adapted to computer simu- lation--and to use the process of historical reconstruction as a means of refining the quality of digital images. Ultimately, the collision of a fifteenth-century painting with current rendering technology suggests new uses for lighting simulation, and calls for consideration of the significance of computer-generated light.

The Cornell Box serves as a visual emblem of the divide between arts and sciences first articulated by C. P. Snow over 40 years ago. To historians of American Art, "Cornell Box" refers to the shadow boxes of Joseph Cornell; in the world of computer graphics, the Cornell Box is the evaluative environment in which the Cornell University Program of Computer Graphics refined its radiosity rendering algorithms. Considering both boxes with reference to the perceptual thought of James J. Gibson allows us to generate a site for collaboration at the intersection of light and art for designers and computer scientists devoted to the development of new digital media.

The current debate on reproduction and architectural publication has established new terms for the examination of architectural photographs. No longer treated simply as a species of architectural documentation-such as renderings or plans- photographs of buildings are acknowledged as sharing in the cultural power of the photographic medium and must consequently be examined as a form of social production. The publication of Richard Neutra's 1946 Kaufmann house reveals the power of the print media in the establishment of an architectural canon; moreover Neutra's habit of reworking photographs of his built designs suggests the appropriateness of reexamining his contribution to the legacy of involving photography and the media in the architectural process.