Communicating slow, invisible environmental processes such as corrosion remains challenging in public contexts. We explore how smell can function as a creative design material in a multisensory VR experience for science communication. Using Research-through-Design (RtD), we developed and iteratively refined a 5-minute VR experience across co-design, prototyping, and public deployment. Olfaction was introduced as an embodied layer to translate imperceptible chemical processes into experiential form. Findings from a festival deployment with 73 participants show that smell enhanced immersion and memorability for some users but was perceived inconsistently and often amplified already salient visual moments. We characterise smell as an unruly material due to variability in perception, diffusion, and context, and contribute an RtD account of multisensory VR design for science communication, outlining implications for designing with olfaction in public settings.

Human behaviour and habits co-evolve with technology, and the metaverse is poised to become a key player in reshaping how we live our everyday life. Given the importance of food in our daily lives, we ask: how will our relationships with food be transformed by the metaverse, and what are the promises and pitfalls of this technology? To answer this, we propose a co-design study that reveals the important elements people value in their daily interactions with food. We then present a speculative catalogue of novel metaverse food experiences, and insights from discussing these ideas with food designers, anthropologists and metaverse experts. Our work aims to provide designers with inspirations for building a metaverse that: provides inclusive opportunities for the future of food; helps re-discover the forgotten or lost knowledge about food; facilitates the exploration, excitement and joy of eating; and reinvigorates the ways that food can soothe and heal.

Location-aware mobile guides are a popular technology for enhancing the experience of heritage walks in historical outdoor sites. Smartphones, as typical mediums for such systems, have been criticised for limiting users’ opportunities for embodied engagement with the environment. In this work, we investigate how display technologies beyond the traditional personal mobile screen can facilitate embodied experiences during outdoor heritage walks. To do this, we revisit the use of portable projected displays as a medium that allows us to explore the effects of overt and blended displays in this context. We conducted a study with 42 participants on an outdoor heritage walk, using two display modalities: smartphone and projected display. We discovered that besides the display modality, users’ attitude toward technology, their embodied relationship with the device, and incorporation of spatial aspects in interaction play a key role in generating engagement and shaping the experience of heritage walks.