Adding Scent to Television Broadcasts by Using Closed Caption Data

In this paper, to present new information and a high sense of realism to the audience, we propose a simple method of adding scent to television (TV) broadcasts. Recently, study of attaching scents to video has been active, and scented videos have been shown to successfully improve viewer understanding and sense of reality. Such videos are currently used mainly for advertisements and specific movies, and so few people have the chance to experience them. Thus, to provide opportunities for the general public to enjoy scent attached video content, we consider adding scent to TV broadcasting, which is the most common type of visual medium. However, the use of existing scented video techniques to synchronize broadcasts and scents would require developing a method to create new types of scent data. Such development would be difficult under current television broadcasting. Therefore, adding scent to a TV broadcast is presently complex. In this study, we add scents to a TV broadcast by attaching the scent information to closed caption data. By utilizing the already broadcast closed caption data, ascent can be added to a TV program and subsequently edited more easily than before. We have verified through experiments that the proposed method works as expected, and hence the attachment of scents to TV broadcasts through our simple approach has been demonstrated to be possible. We hope that through scent addition to TV programs with our developed system, many people can easily enjoy video content with high realism and attractiveness.