• TAINTED
  INSTITUTE OF TECHNICAL EDUCATION/NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE
  [シンガポール]

I am a postgraduate interactive and digital media researcher who works and publishes mainly in the areas of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Mixed Reality and Games.

We wanted to weave meaning with our selection of scents that would be featured in the game and so we started to look at possible cultural links to craft the game narrative. In the end, we based it around a traditional horror folklore of Southeast Asia that has a complementary tie-in with a specific fruit (banana).

Tainted consists of two main modules: 1) the game is developed on Unity (https://unity3d.com/unity) and it communicates with the smell-emitting module over a USB connection. The physical smell-emitting module, which has four vials that contain different scents, is controlled by an Arduino Pro Mini (https://www.arduino.cc). Each vial has an ultrasonic diffuser and an attached cotton stick that draws the liquid scent up to the diffuser unit for scent dissipation. An RGB Light Emitting Diode (LED) is also attached to the bottom of each vial to provide color feedback to the player.

This is the first time that we tried to design a game that explicitly exploits the sense of smell as a game feedback mechanism, and that the selection of one of the key scents was solely inspired by the game narrative (story).

Intrigue the senses to engage the player