People are increasingly purchasing (e.g., food, clothes) and consuming (e.g., movies, courses) online where, traditionally, the sensory interaction has mostly been limited to visual, and to a lesser extent, auditory inputs. However, other sensory interfaces (e.g., including touch screens, together with a range of virtual, and augmented solutions) are increasingly being made available to people to interact online. Moreover, recent progress in the field of human–computer interaction means that online environments will likely engage more of the senses and become more connected with offline environments in the coming years. This expansion will likely coincide with an increasing engagement with the consumer's more emotional senses, namely touch/haptics, and possibly even olfaction. Forward-thinking marketers and researchers will therefore need to appropriate the latest tools/technologies in order to deliver richer online experiences for tomorrow's consumers. This review is designed to help the interested reader better understand what sensory marketing in a digital context can offer, thus hopefully opening the way for further research and development in the area.

This article provides an overview of the recent literature on the use of internet-based testing to address important questions in perception research. Our goal is to provide a starting point for the perception researcher who is keen on assessing this tool for their own research goals. Internet-based testing has several advantages over in-lab research, including the ability to reach a relatively broad set of participants and to quickly and inexpensively collect large amounts of empirical data, via services such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk or Prolific Academic. In many cases, the quality of online data appears to match that collected in lab research. Generally-speaking, online participants tend to be more representative of the population at large than those recruited for lab based research. There are, though, some important caveats, when it comes to collecting data online. It is obviously much more difficult to control the exact parameters of stimulus presentation (such as display characteristics) with online research. There are also some thorny ethical elements that need to be considered by experimenters. Strengths and weaknesses of the online approach, relative to others, are highlighted, and recommendations made for those researchers who might be thinking about conducting their own studies using this increasingly-popular approach to research in the psychological sciences.

The use of the senses of vision and audition as interactive means has dominated the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) for decades, even though nature has provided us with many more senses for perceiving and interacting with the world around us. That said, it has become attractive for HCI researchers and designers to harness touch, taste, and smell in interactive tasks and experience design. In this paper, we present research and design insights gained throughout an interdisciplinary collaboration on a six-week multisensory display – Tate Sensorium – exhibited at the Tate Britain art gallery in London, UK. This is a unique and first time case study on how to design art experiences whilst considering all the senses (i.e., vision, sound, touch, smell, and taste), in particular touch, which we exploited by capitalizing on a novel haptic technology, namely, mid-air haptics. We first describe the overall set up of Tate Sensorium and then move on to describing in detail the design process of the mid-air haptic feedback and its integration with sound for the Full Stop painting by John Latham (1961). This was the first time that mid-air haptic technology was used in a museum context over a prolonged period of time and integrated with sound to enhance the experience of visual art. As part of an interdisciplinary team of curators, sensory designers, sound artists, we selected a total of three variations of the mid-air haptic experience (i.e., haptic patterns), which were alternated at dedicated times throughout the six-week exhibition. We collected questionnaire-based feedback from 2500 visitors and conducted 50 interviews to gain quantitative and qualitative insights on visitors’ experiences and emotional reactions. Whilst the questionnaire results are generally very positive with only a small variation of the visitors’ arousal ratings across the three tactile experiences designed for the Full Stop painting, the interview data shed light on the differences in the visitors’ subjective experiences. Our findings suggest multisensory designers and art curators can ensure a balance between surprising experiences versus the possibility of free exploration for visitors. In addition, participants expressed that experiencing art with the combination of mid-air haptic and sound was immersive and provided an up-lifting experience of touching without touch. We are convinced that the insights gained from this large-scale and real-world field exploration of multisensory experience design exploiting a new and emerging technology provide a solid starting point for the HCI community, creative industries, and art curators to think beyond conventional art experiences. Specifically, our work demonstrates how novel mid-air technology can make art more emotionally engaging and stimulating, especially abstract art that is often open to interpretation.