The impact of having olfactory media on user performance: Scented vs worded images

People mostly tag their images using words or phrases to retrieve them when needed. In addition to textual tags, multisensory digital media could be employed to help people in retrieving their images, with olfactory media (sense of smell) being an example. Accordingly, people can categorise their images by using congruent olfactory media. In this paper, we aim to test whether olfactory media works as a key to retrieving a set of images. To this end, we developed an olfactory-enhanced application in which an olfactory media synchronizes with a 5X5 matrix of images, 4 images being related to the synchronised scent. In addition, a non-olfactory version was devised where words are used as the key. Thirty-two subjects took part in this experiment, evenly split into a control and experimental groups. For assessment purposes, we reported the time spent by the users to take action, and the scores achieved. The results suggest that using olfactory media does have a significant impact on user performance by helping them to find related images. Also, we found the users were willing to use olfactory-enhanced applications for categorizing/retrieving their albums and images.