Brainstorm
To start off with the assignment, Yilin and I both agreed to experiment with different sensations as the breadth of information in immersive experiences. We recognized that despite the involvement of haptic responses in most VR experiences, the common VR, AR, MR, or 360 immersive experiences cannot involve the sensations of smell or taste. We wanted to experiment with smell and touch while including sound in our immersion creation.
Cafe in Rain
Based on the consensus, we first decided on the environment we wanted the participant to gain a sense of presence – a person sitting by an open cafe window beside the road in rainy weather. We expected the participants to feel tranquility and calmness from the experience.
We then made a list of key sensations that constitute this experience and how we can replicate them:
- Smell
- Smell of coffee – brew coffee in the room before the experiment starts
- Smell of wet soil after rain – soak the potting soil in water, and place the soil in front of the fan
- Sound
- Cafe background noises (people talking, coffee machine, jazz music)- speaker placed at the back
- Street noises (rain, cars driving on wet road) – speaker at the front
- Touch
- Warmth of coffee mug – holding a mug with hot water
- Chilly outdoor humid air – a fan blowing towards the participant with a humidifier in the middle
We did not include sight because additional sensation added to the experience (possibly being a video of cars driving in the street in front of the cafe) might cause the opposing effect that we wanted to achieve in this experiment – creating immersion.
Then, we created a layout map of the placement of each element:
Here is what it looks like when a participant is experiencing the experiment:
Reflection
Yilin reflected that the cool breeze from the fan brought her into an outdoor, slightly windy experiment. However, she thinks that the humidifier was pulling her out of the immersive experience because of the weird smell of the humid coming out. In the next iteration, we might clean the humidifier and see if the moist can merge with the breeze more. To bring the auditory experience closer to reality, we might also try adding sound effects to the street noise in which the sound of cars driving across can shift from one side to the other.