Mei-Kei Lai

Macao Polytechnic University

The need of supporting meditation through digital technology has been increased especially after COVID-19. By combining the olfactory experience provided by the ambient incense connected with virtual reality technology, we propose to bring the aesthetic and affective aspects of smell to the users for meditation in the digital era. TranScent aims to...

This paper describes an experimental design project Ludic Odor which explores the possibilities of designing interactive olfactory experience for parents and children in daily family routines. We propose to bring the affective and evocative aspects of smell to the interaction through digital olfaction. It associates the child’s early encounter olfa...

Olfactory experience has become a popular topic in TEI community as its novelty in inviting new type of storytelling and new dimension of medium in embodied interaction. This studio focuses on the experiential approach of designing interactive olfactory experience in real world contexts. We will show two case studies on how to adapt contextual inqu...

With the emergence of phenomenon-based learning, this paper proposed adopting sensory ethnography with contextual inquiry as the methodology for design students to learn through real world experience. Phenomenon-based learning emphasizes that students study the real world phenomenon in a holistic perspective across the boundaries between subjects a...

The sense of smell is closely related with people across time and space. The aesthetic, affective and evocative aspects of smell are widely portrayed in art practices. Olfactory art has its unique expression that other modalities hardly have. Yet this aesthetic medium seems to be underestimated when it comes to the digital age. Current digital olfa...

SenseCenser is a device that senses the act of placing incense chips into it and, subsequently, the volume of incense smoke produced as the chips burn. These values can be connected to various applications, such as lighting equipment, sound systems, showing (moving) images, and more specific installations at particular rituals (e.g., a funeral cere...

Scent has a long history of being treated as the medium for art. Its aesthetic, affective and evocative aspects enrich the art experience. Yet when it comes to the digital era, it seems to become the minority among the artworks. As digital olfaction is getting advanced in recent years, could it open up the opportunity to consider scent as the inter...

In this study, an olfactory installation was presented in a public library in Macao. It took the form of artwork to invite the visitors of the library to experience the work. It integrated smells with audio visuals together into the reading experience. Through watching the old footages of the city and experienced the smells with it, the visitors st...

“Flip the Book – Flip the Memories” is a multimodal interactive artwork exhibited in Sir Robert Ho Tung Library, which is part of Macao World Heritage site. This artwork integrates smell with audio visual together into reading experience. When the reader turns the page of the physical book, it would trigger different videos projected on the book. M...

This paper describes the experience of experimental artwork "Universal Scent Blackbox", which encourages visitors interaction through creating olfactory experience in art museum. Smell is used as the evocative interface between the artwork and the visitors. When a visitor passed by a certain area, it would trigger the odor emission in another area...

The aim of this paper is to discuss the role of scents in interaction design. Scent-output is not an innovative idea in the digital world. From Sensorama (Heilig 1962) to iSmells (DigiScents 2000), people attempt to provide olfactory sensation to enhance user emotional experiences. However, most of them only caught the attention from the media at t...

The paper describes an artistic project which produced some valuable findings in relation to olfactory interactive design. It records a process of discovery in a largely unfamiliar area of interaction. The paper describes how the many difficulties which people have in discriminating, recalling and identifying smells were used as the substance of en...