What did I sniff? Mapping scents onto driving-related messages

The sense of smell is well known to provide very vivid experiences and to mediate a strong activation of crossmodal semantic representations. Despite a growing number of olfactory HCI prototypes, there have been only a few attempts to study the sense of smell as an interaction modality. Here, we focus on the exploration of olfaction for in-car interaction design by establishing a mapping between three different driving-related messages ("Slow down", "Fill gas", "Passing by a point of interest") and four scents (lemon, lavender, peppermint, rose). The results of our first study demonstrate strong associations between, for instance, the "Slow down" message and the scent of lemon, the "Fill gas" message and the scent of peppermint, the "Passing by a point of interest" message and the scent of rose. These findings have been confirmed in our second study, where participants expressed their mapping preferences while performing a simulated driving task.