Stuart Eve writes: Smell has been used previously in a number of museum settings to engage visitors with a reconstructed past sensorium: the smell of the Tyrannosaurus Rex in London's Natural History Museum; the Jorvik Centre in York; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. These explorations of smell are almost exclusively confined to presenting smells to the museum visitor for consumption, usually as a novelty. For example, at the Jorvik Centre the visitors are moved through the re-creation of a Viking town via a 'Time Car' on fixed rails; they are moving through the smellscape that changes depending on how far along the ride they are. Without doubt the multi-sensory experience of Jorvik affects the way visitors think about the exhibits and Aggleton and Waskett have demonstrated that a visitor's recall of the exhibit is better if they are exposed to similar smells at a later time, but due to the 'theme-park' style Time Cars there is little chance to independently explore the multi-sensory atmosphere.
The olfactory challenge for the archaeological embodied GIS is to enable these smells to be experienced in situ while investigating an archaeological site. The smells should be an integrated part of the GIS database; for instance, when dealing with Bronze Age roundhouses as in the vision section above, the smells as well as the appearance of these roundhouses should be experienced when using an embodied GIS. To enact this, the olfaction triggers are simply linked to the GIS data in the same way as the size, shape and orientation of the 3D model for the roundhouse is or the audio files for the burials in York Cemetery.
To demonstrate how this is achieved, I will discuss my use of the Dead Man's Nose (DMN) project at Moesgård Museum's archaeological trail. The archaeological trail at Moesgård consists of a number of different sites at which there are a combination of reconstructions, excavated archaeological remains and standing buildings. These sites range in antiquity from the Neolithic to the medieval period. The work was initially undertaken as part of my PhD research, but was extended during the 2015 York University Heritage Jam. http://www.heritagejam.org A video explaining the mechanics of the device and also demonstrating it in action at Moesgård Museum is shown below.
https://youtu.be/6yEy9rippJk
As the video shows, the Dead Man's Nose consists of an Arduino (computer) board, battery, a BluetoothLE chip, and four small fans contained within small boxes. The boxes contain small drawers in which a scent can be placed on a small piece of cotton wool, which is then dispersed when the fans blow. The fan boxes also have small pieces of velcro on the back, allowing them to be attached either to clothing or to a board that can be worn around the neck (as seen in the video). The device communicates with a mobile phone using BluetoothLE that reads the user's GPS position and (as with the sound example above) emits a smell, by turning on one or more fans, when the user is within a specified radius of an archaeological feature.
More at The Embodied GIS. Using Mixed Reality to explore multi-sensory archaeological landscapes - Stuart Eve
http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue44/3/4-3.html
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