The paper presents our view on the ways that olfactory information could be integrated into multimedia database applications by means of smelling objects. Until recently, multimedia applications have been mainly limited to the use of audiovisual information, stimulating only two of the five senses of human beings. The development of olfactory devices, along with significant progress in understanding the human olfactory system in the last years offers tremendous opportunities for building multimedia applications stimulating also the sense of smell. This could bring important advance in fields like education, medicine, military, and entertainment in the near future. We implemented five types of smelling objects that we used for storing and retrieving olfactory information together with audio-visual information in/from a multimedia database system.
digital smell, multimedia objects, multimedia applications
All articles published by Studies in Informatics and Control (SIC) are published in accordance with the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).