Simulated Oversight

'Virtual nose' may reduce simulator sickness in video games

Purdue University News, Mar 2015  

https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2015/Q1/virtual-nose-may-reduce-simulator-sickness-in-video-games.html

Yes, you can relieve motion sickness in virtual reality by coding a nose overlay into the frame as a visual guide.

I sure didn't realize it until I read this, but you're looking at your nose all day; you're looking at it right now. Well, maybe you're not looking at it, but it's there. Maybe now you're looking at it, since we're talking about it. Anyway, it's there all day. If your eyes are open, your nose is in your field of vision. And when it's not, you're disoriented.

I'm pretty sure this is not what they mean when they say "right under your nose" or "right in front of your face," but it sure works in this case. Throw that onto the heaping pile of other things we don't notice about our nose or what it does for us. And add that to the other pile of things that we could improve if we looked to the nose and olfaction in general as a source of biomimetic supremacy.

Notes:

via Purdue University: Whittinghill, D.M. et al. Nasum virtualis: A simple technique for reducing simulator sickness. In Proceedings of the Games Developers Conference (GDC), San Francisco, CA, USA, 2–6 March 2015; p. 74.

via University of Wuerzburg: A Virtual Nose as a Rest-Frame - The Impact on Simulator Sickness and Game Experience. Carolin Wienrich et al, 10th International Conference on Virtual Worlds and Games for Serious Applications, Sep 2018. DOI:10.1109/VS-Games.2018.8493408

https://doi.org/10.1109/VS-Games.2018.8493408

via the BioComputing Lab at Korea University of Technology and Education: A Study on Visually Induced VR Reduction Method for Virtual Reality Sickness. Ju-hye Won and Yoon Sang Kim. Appl. Sci. 2021, 11(14), 6339; https://doi.org/10.3390/app11146339.

Hot Mosques

 aka Heat Activated Scented Architecture

This is a real photo by Mohammad Domiri

The mortar of mosques was mixed with musk and other aromatics so that during the hottest part of the day, when the entire building was warm to the touch, they would exude their hidden olfactory treasures upon the worshipers inside.

I first read this on Perfume Shrine, the most important perfume blog out there. I was a little upset, in fact, that I had never heard of this in all my years of formal study of architecture.

Cultural Perception of Musk

Dec 2009, Perfume Shrine

The Benzene Molecule

The archetypal hydrocarbon

As an initiation, and as a first test post, I offer to the internet this beautiful mystery of organic chemistry - a hydrocarbon.

This is a visual representation of the benzene molecule by data scientist David Gunther. It is perfectly radially symmetrical, the most perfectly-formed of all the organic molecules, and in fact the name from which all ring-structure molecules are named - The Aromatics.

The smell of benzene is distinct. In some places of the world, gasoline is called benzene. It is the quintessential hydrogen carbon bond, a perfect, if transient, product of molecular mathematics. The molecules bond with each other in a ring, making it an isometry of the mythological uroborous, the snake that eats its own tail. This carbon-ring structure of the benzene molecule was discovered by August Kekule in the 19th century, brought to him in a hypnotic state of repose, as chains of carbon and hydrogen atoms danced in his head. Nostradamus was the first to isolate the benzene molecule, and from his own urine. Check my sources on that, I think I'm making it up.

But as for the picture above, it is a data map of the position of the molecules. The hydrogen-carbon bond is transient, dynamic. The molecules are forever dancing, in a quantum superposition, and hence the smeared visual effects of this graphic. Thanks to David Gunther for this beauty, and if only Kekule could see it!

And so we're off to a good ramble, just to get things started. I'd like to give thanks to this webspace for allowing me to populate herein. Onward.