________________________________________________________________________Olfaction, or smell, is one of the last challenges which multimedia applications have to conquer. As far as computerised smell is concerned, there are several difficulties to overcome, particularly those associated with the ambient nature of smell. In this paper, we present results from an empirical study exploring users' perception of olfaction-enhanced multimedia displays. Findings show that olfaction significantly adds to the user multimedia experience. Moreover, use of olfaction leads to an increased sense of reality and relevance. Our results also show that users are tolerant of the interference and distortion effects caused by olfactory effect in multimedia.
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INTRODUCTIONOlfactory enhanced multimedia displays concerns themselves with associating computer generated smell with other media in order to enrich the users' experience and perception of a multimedia presentation or application. That olfaction-enhanced multimedia is a challenging research area is reflected by the relative paucity of research works in this area.Current usage of olfaction in multimedia has mostly been limited to the area of multimodal information displays, particularly in the area of presenting system and application output in alternative modes for end users. In such systems, there are different output modes available for presenting information, but only one data medium is used at any time to convey the required information and olfactory data usage in such application systems would often be used in response to, or to signify, the occurrence of some application event. Our interest with olfaction in multimedia displays is however concentrated with its usage when combined with other media. To this end, olfactory data may be used to enhance the meaning and provide clarity of user presented information and increase the sense of reality and enjoyment in multimedia applications. Most of the existing work done using olfactory data integrated with other media objects has mostly been done in the virtual reality field (Boyd et al., 2006;Dinh et al., 1999;Drolet et al., 2009;Jones et al., 2004;Kaye 2001;Nakamoto et al., 2008;Richard et al., 2006;Tijou, Richard and Richard, 2006;Washburn and Jones, 2004;Zybura and Eskeland, 1999), and only one of the reported cases shows any significant results to show that adding olfactory data to such systems impacted on the sense of reality of the application quite considerably.