What is it about?

We designed an open-source olfactory interaction DIY toolkit – O&O (abbreviation of Open-source & Olfaction), to empower individuals with no related research background to design and prototype interactive olfactory interfaces with enhanced accessibility, mobility, and design guidance.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

While advances in interactive technologies have shown promise in vision, audio, and tactile interactions, the use of smell is under-explored. Scent is an invisible, lingering, and pervasive medium that is hard to prototype. Constructing olfactory interfaces on demand requires significant design proficiency and engineering effort. The absence of powerful and convenient tools (especially on the hardware side) that reduce design and technical complexity posed obstacles for future research in the area.

Perspectives

Olfactory interface design is a niche area in HCI research, so lowering the technical barrier to attract more designers, non-expert users, would be helpful to expand the impact of this community. Our opensource toolkit work is precisely for this purpose, and we also take care to build prototypes using easily available materials and components (e.g. cardboard, arduino, etc.), so that more people can participate in the design and development of olfactory-related interfaces. In addition, during the workshop we discovered that the toolkit can also be used for STEM education, but there is a need for deeper iterations of the toolkit, such as providing more programming support and reducing the difficulty of hardware development. We hope that our work can provide help and inspiration for others to follow.

Qi Lu
Tsinghua University

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: O&O: A DIY toolkit for designing and rapid prototyping olfactory interfaces, April 2022, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3491102.3502033.
You can read the full text:

Read

Contributors

The following have contributed to this page