Digital Sensory-enabling Technologies: A Marketing Perspective

Creative Language Technologies

This is episode #22 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 28th of July, 2022.

My guest today is Dr. Carlos Velasco, associate professor in the Department of Marketing, BI Norwegian Business School (Norway), and the co-founded of the Centre for Multisensory Marketing. Carlos received his D.Phil. in Experimental Psychology from Oxford University, after which he worked in a number of postdoctoral and consulting projects in Europe, Asia, and North and South America. His work is situated at the intersection of Psychology, Marketing, and Human–Computer Interaction, and focuses on understanding, and capitalizing on our multisensory experiences and their guiding principles. He wrote the book "Multisensory experiences: Where the senses meet technology" (2020, Oxford University Press). Carlos has worked with a number of companies from around the world on topics such as multisensory experiences, food and drink, branding, and consumer research.
We started the interview with the broad topic of digital sensory-enabling technologies — and elaborated on the belief that, in the future, digital environments will most likely engage more of the senses and become more interconnected with the real world. But this a very challenging problem, and this most likely will involve a wide range of collaborative efforts across many disciplines.

We then moved to the reality-virtuality continuum - a framework for classifying the wide range of immersive technologies available today — and discussed the main factors that drive the degree of immersion and presence in digital spaces.

The second part of the interview covered technology where we focused in particular on how to improve eating experiences in rather specific places, like space. Of course, besides a short debate on the impact technology will have on society in the next 10-20 years, we concluded the show with a dialogue on the ethical implications of such technologies.

Here is the show.
Show Notes:

- Digital sensory-enabling technologies
- Are we satisfied with the current immersive digital sensory experiences?
- A wide inter-disciplinary approach to the integration of the different senses that need to be stimulated during digital consumer experiences? And challenges for researchers working at the intersection of these areas
- The reality-virtuality continuum model offers a framework for classifying the wide range of immersive technologies available today
- Individual differences in perception in sensory marketing
- The role does language play in transducing between/ among the various senses
- Eating experiences in space
- The role of technology in the next 10-20 years in reviving the ‘felt consumer experience’
- Ethical implications of digital sensory-enabling technologies

Relevant book:
Velasco, Carlos, and Marianna Obrist. Multisensory experiences: Where the senses meet technology. Oxford University Press, 2020.
Link to Dr. Velasco’s website:

https://carlosvelasco.info/