Do I Smell Coffee? The Tale of a 360° Mulsemedia Experience

One of the main challenges in current multimedia networking environments is to find solutions to help accommodate the next generation of mobile application classes with stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements while enabling the Quality of Experience (QoE) provisioning for users. One such application class, featured in this article, is 360° mulsemedia—multiple sensorial media—which enriches 360° video by adding sensory effects that stimulate human senses beyond those of sight and hearing, such as the tactile and olfactory ones. In this article, we present a conceptual framework for 360° mulsemedia delivery and a 360° mulsemedia-based prototype that enables users to experience 360° mulsemedia content. User evaluations revealed that higher video resolutions do not necessarily lead to the highest QoE levels in our experimental setup. Therefore, bandwidth savings can be leveraged with no detrimental impact on QoE.