Season Traveller

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In the same way that we experience the real-world through a range of senses, experiencing a virtual environment through multiple sensory modalities may augment both our presence within a scenario and our reaction to it. Here, we present Season Traveller, a multisensory virtual reality (VR) narration of a journey through four seasons within a mystical realm. By adding olfactory and haptic (thermal and wind) stimuli, we extend traditional audio-visual VR technologies to achieve enhanced sensory engagement within interactive experiences. Using both subjective measures of presence and elicited physiological responses, we evaluated the impact of different modalities on the virtual experience. Our results indicate that 1) the addition of any singular modality improves sense of presence with respect to traditional audio-visual experiences and 2) providing a combination of these modalities produces a further significant enhancement over the aforementioned improvements. Furthermore, insights into participants’ psychophysiology were extrapolated from electrodermal activity (EDA) and heart rate (HR) measurements during each of the VR experiences.

 Keywords: Multisensory VR; Virtual Reality; Multimodal Interaction.

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Acknowledgements

This research is supported by the National Research Foundation, Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore under its International Research Centres in Singapore Funding Initiative.