Season Traveller
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.
Publications
Season Traveller: Multisensory Narration for Enhancing the Virtual Reality Experience. CHI 2018 – Montréal, Canada (Acceptance Rate: 25.7%). [YouTube]
A Demonstration of Season Traveller: Multisensory Narration for Enhancing the Virtual Reality Experience. CHI EA 2018 – Montréal, Canada (Acceptance Rate: 25.7%).
Exhibitions / Demonstrations
CHI Expo 2018 / “A Demonstration of Season Traveller: Multisensory Narration for Enhancing the Virtual Reality Experience” at Palais des Congrès de Montréal, Canada / April 2018.
Press
2017 The New Paper, “ITE students develop multi-sensory virtual reality game”
Acknowledgements
This research is supported by the National Research Foundation, Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore under its International Research Centres in Singapore Funding Initiative.