Browsing With All Senses

I can all but guarantee this is not something that has crossed your mind anytime recently. In short, when was the last time you browsed with all five senses?

There are five senses – sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste – yet we only mostly use one when browsing the web: sight. Except for the occasional background music (which is mostly unwanted), we rely on our eyes alone to receive information from webpages and put them into context. For example, seeing an “amateurish” design might help us to put the site into the context of “single author, no big corporation behind it.” A toolbar’s PageRank bar might tell you how “big” the site is. A yellow address bar (in Firefox) indicates a HTTPS connection.

However, there are many info bits left out. Next to rendering the context visually only, we could make a browser based on new hardware which delivers to all senses to help us faster grasp information. For example, with a bit of sci-fi we can imagine the browser do the following: Google BlogScoped

[tags]firefox,sci-fi,web browsing,background music,https connection,five senses[/tags]