A theater for viewing and editing multi-sensory content

This research has been carried out as part of a multi-sensory theater project that aims at establishing technology to integrate a range of sensations such as visual, audio, force, tactile, vestibular, and odor into passive and interactive media content and communications. This paper describes the approaches that are being examined and the current status of the project. As a platform for the experiments, a prototype version of a multi-sensory theater has been implemented. The theater is equipped with devices that present wind and olfactory sensations. The sensation of wind is generated by both computer-controlled fans and air nozzles connected to a source of compressed air, and the olfactory sensation is presented by emitting odorants into the air. To facilitate the creation of content, a framework for editing multi-sensory information was constructed, in which all of the devices were connected to and controlled by a sequencer based on a MIDI interface.