TEI: Smell interaction week
The lecturer explained the possibilities and challenges of smell interaction in today’s world. Numbers of sensors, limited technologies, perception, and a not having common platform are noticeable challenges that are being faced in this area. He also mentioned about the google nose that the world is working to introduce odor features in VR games and many other projects. The main idea was that we, as an interaction designer, have to think about smell interaction and find the possible ways to add such a feature in our future project as an essential aspect.
Instantly, I thought that there are two main factors that we use our smelling sense. The first one is for the identification of any form of foodstuff status or to trace the location of that particular stuff that produces the smell. If we can able to create a device that could show freshness or staleness of a cooked and raw foodstuff, that would be handy kits to have it. Everyone has its Unique smell, so we can use this factor to trace missing people with a device that can track humans by smell. That would be very useful stuff to find out who was present in a crime scene and where did the suspect leave to.
Today we also learn about a dating project regarding smell interaction. The smell dating app was an inspiring and ideal use of the smell factor in this project. The concept to recommended people for a date if their cloth smell has matched. I thought that the odor is also part of a person’s personality that could affect to inspire others.
We also had a practical session that all the students supposed to smell liquids and guess what does it smells like. The smells were familiar to me, but I could not remember exactly what it was. I understood that smell could also be an element that can take the person into history and museums would be the best place to use smell based interaction in which the visitor could sense the history differently.
TEI Workshop
Today’s lesson was the continuation of Monday’s lecture that was about the smell interaction. It seems that the lecturer wanted to link the smell interaction with games. I thought that could be a very playful game for those who are blind, and the game should be straightforward, such as earning points by guessing the right smell. I never imagined that I would prefer to play smelling games because of yesterday’s bad experience. We all were smelling the liquid and guessing what does it smell like.
During the lecture, I also came to know about Kojima, who was the developer of the snatcher game (1998). He was the first who requested his company owners to add odor of the blood in the floppy disk. His Idea inspired me to change my thoughts about smell based games that it is just for the blind people. Three years before, for the first time, I had an experience of VR games, which was close to reality, but I really felt something was missing, and now I understand that it was the smell. If I could smell the odor in VR games, it would be the same as real-world experience.
In the last session of the class, we all participated in different sorts of games that were relevant to smell interaction. The first one was the rosewater bomb, in which eggs were filled with different water smells. I used to think that the smell is something that a person can sense it and never thought that we could throw it to a particular distance. We started to play ball catcher game. We threw the egg to each other, and everyone was supposed to catch the egg as we all knew that eggs are a fragile item, so while catching, we were so careful not to break it. It also reminds me of the traditional game that is used to play in India Holi, that the people used to throw the colors to each other.
Kodo is a Japanese game in which players supposed to recognize the different smells. Personally, I found this very difficult to remember the smell even though it smelled different, but I could not able to keep in my memory by numbers. It also gives me a hint that I could improve my memory by playing such a game.
Weekly Project
The main requirement of the project was that we have to come up with an existing game and To modify it with smell interactions. We thought about some complex and exciting games in the ideation part, but we realized that it could be very boring, and the rules would confuse the user to understand if we add smell interaction in it. Then, we shifted our focus to simple games with simple roles that are designed for the children.
We all decided to go with the snake and ladder game that the player has to roll the dice, and according to the points, the player has to move its token. The ladders help the user to move to higher numbers, but the snake will bring it down to lower numbers. We modified this game by bringing up some changes. Instead of dice, we thought if we could have a bundle of cards that players could scratch it and identify the smell. According to the right guess, the player could move their token in a forward position. We also change the snake to a different pair of colors. If the token has placed in above of color, then it has to move forward or backward to the same paired color.
We also faced some challenges and problems during this project that we could not find a scratchable material where we could store the smell and stick it into the cards. One thing that we realized later how many cards could this game have because after the first scratch, then the card would not be used any longer. Practically, this game is so costly and affects environmental issues. How long a person should buy the cards and sink it to the garbage after the first use.
Habib Ur Rahman 