Audio Masking Effect on Inter-Component Skews in Olfaction-Enhanced Multimedia Presentations

Media-rich content plays a vital role in consumer applications today, as these applications try to find new and interesting ways to engage their users. Video, audio, and the more traditional forms of media content continue to dominate with respect to the use of media content to enhance the user experience. Tactile interactivity has also now become widely popular in modern computing applications, while our olfactory and gustatory senses continue to have a limited role. However, in recent times, there have been significant advancements regarding the use of olfactory media content (i.e., smell), and there are a variety of devices now available to enable its computer-controlled emission. This paper explores the impact of the audio stream on user perception of olfactory-enhanced video content in the presence of skews between the olfactory and video media. This research uses the results from two experimental studies of user-perceived quality of olfactory-enhanced multimedia, where audio was present and absent, respectively. Specifically, the paper shows that the user Quality of Experience (QoE) is generally higher in the absence of audio for nearly perfect synchronized olfactory-enhanced multimedia presentations (i.e., an olfactory media skew of between {−10,+10s}); however, for greater olfactory media skews (ranging between {−30s;−10s} and {+10s, +30s}) user QoE is higher when the audio stream is present. It can be concluded that the presence of the audio has the ability to mask larger synchronization skews between the other media components in olfaction-enhanced multimedia presentations.