The Impact of Multi-Sensorial Media in Smart Home Scenario on User Experience and Emotions

The traditional multimedia contents only stimulate sight and hearing human senses. Therefore, the research efforts try to provide realistic media contents to the users to stimulate the other senses, realistic media contents are media with multiple sensorial effects, with the aim of increasing user's sense of reality and emotions strength through the five senses representation. In home environment, to deliver the additional effects, customary devices (e.g., air conditioning, lights, smartphones, etc.), provided of opportune smart features, can be deployed. In smart home use cases, the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm has been widely adopted to connect smart devices. This paper presents user perception of IoT-based multi-sensorial media delivery to TV users in home entertainment scenario, through subjective test measurement campaign. In particular we analyzed the influence of three sensory effects (i.e., airflow, lights and vibration) on user annoyance, emotions, sense of reality, and if users consider the sensory effects distracting, through presenting ten audiovisual sequences that contain different emotions like surprise, anger, fear, fun, and worry, which people commonly use to describe emotions in audiovisual sequences. The participants' response employed to reveal the impact of sensory effects on user experience.