Ad-Smell: Advertising movie with a simple olfactory display

Abstract

The idea of adding the smell to the advertising movie for describing the scent of each event in the advertising movie has been proposed to improve the current way of advertising movies, which can perceive only pictures and sound. Using the Ad-Smell, the customer can smell the advertising movie. The users need an Ad-Smell application to read a smell and an olfactory display in order to release scents. There are two main parts in an Ad-Smell system, which are an olfactory display and a release smell application. An olfactory display consists of a control box and four smell boxes with four fans. Fans will be turned on and release scents when receiving the signal from an Ad-Smell application. The Ad-Smell application is designed to detect a customer movement from a web camera and then show an advertising movie. During a display of advertising movie, Ad-Smell reads control signals in the movie and decides to send signals to an olfactory display. The Ad-Smell application consists of six major components: 1) Webcam Controlling, 2) Motion Detection, 3) Movie Controlling, 4) SubSmell Reading, 5) Scent Releasing, and 6) Olfactory Display Monitoring. We use Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 to develop the user interface and the Ad-Smell components. Copyright 2009 ACM.