Odor Radar and Situational Awareness

Smell significantly enhances sense of realism in virtual reality, researchers find

Apr 2022, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2022-04-significantly-realism-virtual-reality.html

While fighting zombies in survival mode, smell is likely the last thing on your mind. But our research has shown that the sense least associated with virtual reality actually holds the key to a more immersive experience. Participants in our study felt that smell gave them a greater sense of really "being there" in the virtual environment.

Surely a sweet-smelling game like Animal Crossing would be a better candidate for testing this theory? Well, as it turns out, bad smells may enhance the VR experience much more than good smells. 

Yes, and in fact, bad smells are about to do a lot more than good smells. Whether it's monitoring isoprene in the workplace to enforce occupational mental health regulations (science fiction I know, but it has to start somewhere), or using an odor alert system at work that gets more intense as your inbox gets too full, so you don't have to look or listen to it, we will be using odors in new ways in our everyday lives. It's the last sense to be digitized, to enter the interconnected datasphere, but universal odor machines and the coming chemosensor revolution are just two examples of why the time is coming for us to recognize the untapped potential of this new channel for communication. 

via The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation CSIRO, Australia: Nicholas S. Archer et al, Odour enhances the sense of presence in a virtual reality environment, PLOS ONE (2022). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0265039

https://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265039

Image credit:  Mandelbulb 191, Krzysztofmarczak

Post Script:

Little Signals: A Google multi-object system to deliver notifications in a gentler manner

Apr 2022, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2022-04-google-multi-object-notifications-gentler-manner.html

Only a few days after this post was published, I'm updating it with a news article from engineers at Google tells us there are other people thinking about how to communicate to users in new ways. 

Designed to deliver notifications to users in a gentler manner than current systems.

One such device is called simply Air, and it sends notifications via puffs of air, similar, Google says, to the slight movement of leaves on a plant as they rustle in response to a slight breeze. Another is called Button—it grows as it fills with information, such as messages piling up in an email folder. Twisting it one way reveals more details, while twisting the other way reveals fewer details. There is also a device called Movement—it has seven pegs that are lined up and which rise and fall. It is meant to convey timer or calendar notifications.

via Google engineers: https://littlesignals.withgoogle.com/

Notes:

Putting a nose in the visual field acts as a point of reference thereby lessening motion sickness and disorientation in virtual reality:

Simulated Oversight, 2022

http://www.limbicsignal.com/2022/03/simulated-oversight.html

Smells aren't just good for video games, but for old-fashioned role playing games as well:

Adventure Scents - Try our scent special effects to enhance your favorite games, books, movies, costumes, and more. Alchemist's Lab, Ancient Library, Bombed-Out Ruins; there's 60 in all.

https://oddfishgames.com/collections/adventure-scents

The Origin of Artificial Olfaction

Researchers unveil a pruning algorithm to make artificial intelligence applications run

Apr 2020, phys.org

MIT researchers have a new and better way to compress models.

It's so simple that they unveiled it in a tweet last month: Train the model, prune its weakest connections, retrain the model at its fast, early training rate, and repeat, until the model is as tiny as you want.

In other words, in order to make a more efficient artificial brain, you grow it from scratch, like a person. 

This is a welcome development for artificial olfaction enthusiasts, because we won't see fully-functioning synthetic olfactory systems until we can first get a "lifetime" worth of autobiographical data for that system. 

That feeling you get when "the smell of grandma's attic" hits you, it will not work if you didn't have a grandma. The data used by an olfactory system, artificial or otherwise, will come not only from infinite odorous molecules and their physiochemical properties, but also from the limbic system. And not just a limbic system, it has to be one that is preloaded with physiological datapoints as they relate to different combinations of odorous molecules. That requires a lifetime of matching bodily experiences, social experiences, and ultimately autobiographical moments to odors. 

To decode olfaction is not so much a phylogenetic (species) problem as an ontogenetic (individual) problem. There is so much variety in the way we perceive smells, that to use a phylogenetic approach would exclude the majority of what makes smell such a powerful experience. It needs meaning; it is by nature subjective, not objective. In other words, it needs a subject, and in ways that other senses can do without (see object recognition, for example).

Image source: Hiroto Ikeuchi cyberpunk

Notes

Comparing Rewinding and Fine-tuning in Neural Network Pruning, arXiv:2003.02389 [cs.LG] arxiv.org/abs/2003.02389

Post Script

Artificial brains may need sleep too

June 2020, phys.org

"We study spiking neural networks, which are systems that learn much as living brains do," said Los Alamos National Laboratory computer scientist Yijing Watkins. "We were fascinated by the prospect of training a neuromorphic processor in a manner analogous to how humans and other biological systems learn from their environment during childhood development."

Watkins and her research team found that the network simulations became unstable after continuous periods of unsupervised learning. When they exposed the networks to states that are analogous to the waves that living brains experience during sleep, stability was restored. "It was as though we were giving the neural networks the equivalent of a good night's rest," said Watkins.

Ghost Food

This came out a while ago (2013), but I thought it would be a good time of year to remind everyone.

Imagine a future where the culinary pleasures of your youth no longer exist in their native form. We already hear talk of things like chocolate and even coffee being endangered by a combination of climate change and our consumer economy.

It's hard to imagine a future like this, because you know that we, the ingenious monkeys that we are, would never let it happen. A sensory art duo teamed up to start the process of solving this future problem.

The instigators here were Miriam Simun, who made ricotta cheese from human breastmilk, and Miriam Songster, an olfactory artist with an extensive body of work (and who also contributed to the book Designing with Smell AND worked on the smellscapes project started by the late Kate MacLean.)

Maybe you think people should have better things to do than to solve problems that don't really exist yet, but hey, that's what art is for; Not to create problems, but to help us to see better the world we're already in. And as the wise and every prescient David Byrne has said ~ "It's not that artists are ahead of their time, it's just the rest of us are behind."*

Escaping the inevitable with a Direct Olfactory Stimulation Device.

The technology developed here, and pictured above, is called a Direct Olfactory Stimulation Device, and it is supposed to provide a "simulated flavor experience" for foods that may one day be threatened by extinction.

Chocolate, peanut butter, and deep-fried Cod fish were the focus foods. If you think one of these is not like the others, you're right. This food truck was stationed in Newark, New Jersey (among other locations), and for the strong Portuguese population there, Cod is an important culinary component.

The "food" was built on a base of climate change-resilient ingredients, because the idea is that we're already in the future, and this is how we deal.

People lined up to get fitted with their sensory stimulator, and took time to give their impression. Here's one I thought was really good, "If it was an exact replica, there would be no moment of realization of potential loss, and the project a failure - "I guess climate change isn't so bad..." .  You can get more responses here.

Overall I see this as a great work of olfactory science fiction, a subgenre that is mostly vacant, yet fertile for exploration.

*This is heavily paraphrased, and also attributed to David Byrne although someone else before him should probably get credit.

Notes:

Ghost Food - An art exhibit shows how we might eat after global warming

What would you do in a world without cod, chocolate, or peanut butter?

By Adi Robertson, The Verge, 2013

Ghost Food

2013, Edible Geography

Designing with Smell -Practices, Techniques and Challenges

Edited by Victoria Henshaw, Kate McLean, Dominic Medway, Chris Perkins, Gary Warnab

Taylor and Francis, 2018

Post Script:

I thought this was a really good idea - Ode is a product that distributes scents into a room before mealtime to stimulate appetites in older folks.

And I thought this was pretty ridiculous. Once in a while I try to search something that couldn't possibly be a thing, like "human chocolate" and then I get this:

Human Chocolate Fountain

Stand Corrected on Smelling Robots

It’s already happening, in Edinburgh: Robot noses are taking our jobs – doctor’s jobs, that is. We already know that dogs can tell when you’re sick just by the way you smell. And maybe less of us know that dogs can smell the place on your body where the sickness comes from, like if you have some kind of cancer hiding inside you. Alexendra Horowitz went into great detail about that kind of magic in her book on dogs’ smell.

It’s different now, however, because these aren’t dogs but computers. To get a bit more specific, it’s a gas-sniffing machine (called a GC-MS spectrophotometer, gulp, the de facto artificial smelling machine) combined with a special kind of ‘computer’ called a neural network.

If you’ve ever read my book or my blog or you’ve not been under a rock for the past 5 years, you’ve heard of neural nets. They are these magical new* ways of computing that created Google’s DeepDream and AlphaGo and every other headline where a computer did something we never thought a computer could do (like to dream and make art, yes). And now they smell.

But not really; we’ll get to that. First, it’s important to point out that this news comes from Nvidia, who makes GPU chips, which are not CPU chips. The computers we use, and have used forever, run on CPU chips – that’s the way it’s always been. Then the part of the computer that does the graphics, a GPU, started to do more and more of the computing (CPU).  We heard about GPUs first in regards to video games, but then because of Bitcoin because they use tons of interconnected GPUs to do their mining (and yes all those gamers got pissed because the price of GPUs exploded in tandem with the cryptocurrency bubble).

GPUs do more than provide smooth, clear graphics for your video games or authenticated cryptocurrency for your third world country blackmarket terrorist druglord network. They make a computer more like a brain, and hence the term artificial neural network.

Brains are all interconnected – neurons and axons, hub and spoke. Neural nets, with their GPU-neurons, approximate a brain better NOT because of a better algorithm software, but a better hardware. And with all this, we’re seeing artificial intelligence explode – I hate to say it – but it’s happening just like Ray Kurzweil said it would.

So after beating a human at Go, after successfully debating a human on the benefits to humanity of space travel, after creating its own language that humans can’t even understand, after detecting health abnormalities in patients’ xrays better than doctors, and after being able to play paper rock scissors so well that it can predict what we will throw before we throw it and hence beat us every single time – the damn thing now smells. (The paper rock scissors example is simply processing speed – the system sees our hands about to make a shape, and counters so fast that to us it seems like it happened ‘at the same time.’)

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. First thing to note is that this thing is not smelling. It’s been trained to recognize a very small subset of molecules related to cancer.  Whereas humans can detect any volatile organic molecule (rough definition), this thing can only detect what we’ve trained it to detect.**  And this is not the first time a system has been trained to smell – it happens a lot with bomb sniffing, for example, and artificially augmented bomb sniffing remote control cicadas are also real. Anyway, next is where I have to geek the F out: the part of us that smells IS a neural net.

Granted, our whole brain is like a neural net (yes, hence the use of the words ‘neural net’). But the part of our brain that specifically processes, or organizes the electrical signals from molecular contact and turns them into electrical signals for perception, is a pyramid-structure network (it’s called the piriform cortex for that reason, but it’s also known as the olfactory cortex) where hundreds of receptors are whittled down to a few signal fibers. And if you’ve ever seen a picture of a neural net, well, it’s the same thing.

This is one of the underlying themes in my book, and one of the reasons I was compelled to write it. Our sense of smell, the most under-studied of all the senses, is actually more like the most advanced technology there is right now, that being artificial intelligent brain-like systems. I like to call them intelligentities (which is gender neutral btw, and also neutral on some other thing we aren’t even upset about yet, where we make a biased distinction between humans and computers).

Although it seems like we’re making serious progress in this area, I still assert that studying olfaction is an ideal way to optimize these kinds of systems. Until then, you can rest assured that although these things can already do basically everything better than you, they still can’t smell.  (And many of us will have to wonder – is that a bad thing? I.e., will humans in the distant future, once we have the option, will they still want to smell?)

*Marvin Minsky et al were talking about neural nets in the early 80’s but the hardware wasn’t there yet to make them sing.

**Artificial Intelligence can only do what we train it to do. And this is a major part of the inherent biases that show up in these programs, and the reason we need to do a better job of choosing their training programs and then testing these programs to see if they discriminate and against who. Search up this phrase to find out more – ‘man is to computer programmer as woman is to homemaker.’

Notes:

Image source: Olfactory Bulb (aka non-artificial neural network)

Image source: Artificial Neural Network

Article source:

AI Can Smell Illnesses in Human Breath

June 2018, nvidia.com

Wiki:

Artificial Neural Network