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# Project Description Scentbound Xingyu Gao Summary Final work Hi, I’m Xingyu Gao. My research and creative practice focus on HCI, multimodal interaction, and immersive experiences, with current interests in scent-enhanced emotional and narrative games, accessibility, and VR. I build practical, end-to-end prototypes with Unity, Arduino, and AI, exploring how technology can enable more meaningful, inclusive, and engaging interactive products and learning/entertainment experiences. Hi, I’m Xingyu Gao. My research and creative practice focus on HCI, multimodal interaction, and i... College UAL Creative Computing Institute Course MSc Creative Computing Graduation year 2025 Commercial games and virtual reality experiences rely heavily on vision and sound. Smell, although closely linked to emotion and autobiographical memory, is still largely marginal in interaction design. This project combines speculative world-building, a playable 3D game prototype, a physical olfactory device, and a small-scale study on matching smells to typical game scenes, to explore how scent can be designed and used in game experiences. I first designed a first-person 3D game set in a future where natural ecologies and natural smells have been replaced by artificial systems, and real smells have become a scarce resource and a form of social power. The player is a researcher forced to work for a corporation, sent to reconstructed scenes such as a spring flower field and a winter church to collect and analyse smell samples. The game is both a sequence of tasks and a journey in which the player gradually recovers lost memories and uncovers the commercial monopoly and memory manipulation behind these “natural smells”. As the missions progress, the player realises that these scenes are not simply fragments of the “past”, but the remains of their own memories and of humanity’s collective memory. To support this experience, I designed and built a low-cost olfactory device based on Arduino, using four independent atomiser modules to drive four scent bottles. By combining these channels, the system provides different smell configurations for three key scenes. On this basis, I designed a scene–scent matching user study: participants watched representative game scenes, selected from several candidate smells, and gave subjective ratings of their emotional responses and sense of immersion. This project contributes: (1) a VR game design case that treats scent as a core narrative and atmospheric element; (2) a reusable, cost-controlled multi-channel olfactory hardware prototype; and (3) an experimental framework for studying how players subjectively map smells onto virtual scenes and emotions. Final work Demo video Includes: a showcase video featuring a complete gameplay flow, a demonstration of the interactive in-game device, and the experiment results. Research and process Oral presentation video Includes: background research, project architecture, the design and development process, experimental design and results, and future directions. Share this project Commercial games and virtual reality experiences rely heavily on vision and sound. Smell, although closely linked to emotion and autobiographical memory, is still largely marginal in interaction design. This project combines speculative world-building, a playable 3D game... A link to this page has been added to your clipboard Browse related work Digital Experiences Futures Play
# Links ## Official page - https://ualshowcase.arts.ac.uk/project/690153/cover ## External - https://www.linkedin.com/in/xingyugaodudu/ - https://www.instagram.com/xingyu8551 - https://xingyugao-dudu.github.io/index.html - mailto:g18999255@gmail.com - https://portfolio-tools.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/06173413/Thesis-Scentbound-Xingyu-Gao24011673-2.pdf - https://portfolio-tools.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/06181901/Project-Overview-Presentation-1.pdf - https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=https%3A%2F%2Fualshowcase.arts.ac.uk%2Fproject%2F690153%2Fcover&text=Scentbound - https://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fualshowcase.arts.ac.uk%2Fproject%2F690153%2Fcover&media=https%3A%2F%2Fportfolio-tools.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2025%2F12%2F06173244%2FFrame-32.png&description=Scentbound