Sharing and Experiencing Hardware and Methods to Advance Smell, Taste, and Temperature Interfaces

There has been a monumental push from the CHI community to bring more human senses to interactive devices. This trend is significant because we use all our senses in everyday interactions but only an extremely narrow subset when interacting with computers. This workshop focuses on bringing together researchers to advance some of the most challenging senses to embed into interfaces, but arguably the most exciting: smell, taste, and temperature. To integrate these modalities into interfaces, researchers not only use methods from traditional mechanics or haptics (e.g., pumps, heating pads, etc.) but must also acquire tacit skills and understandings from psychophysics, neuroscience, anatomy, and chemistry (e.g., receptor signaling pathways or food chemistry). This demo-based workshop provides a platform to come together and bring their demonstrations, experiments, and hardware to experience, discuss, and advance the field.