Olfaction and Selective Rendering

Accurate simulation of all the senses in virtual environments is a computationally expensive task. Visual saliency models have been used to improve computational performance for rendered content, but this is insufficient for multi-modal environments. This paper considers cross-modal perception and, in particular, if and how olfaction affects visual attention. Two experiments are presented in this paper. Firstly, eye tracking is gathered from a number of participants to gain an impression about where and how they view virtual objects when smell is introduced compared to an odourless condition. Based on the results of this experiment a new type of saliency map in a selective-rendering pipeline is presented. A second experiment validates this approach, and demonstrates that participants rank images as better quality, when compared to a reference, for the same rendering budget