Engineering: Smelling Flowers in Virtual Reality | Nature Communications | Nature’s portfolio

Paper showing a wearable miniature virtual reality (VR) interface that allows users to smell many different scents, including rosemary, mojitos, pancakes, and durian.Nature CommunicationsThe device can generate scents locally, quickly and accurately, and wirelessly connect to the virtual reality world for a more realistic and immersive user experience. The authors say future research could lead to learning environments that use video games, 4D movies, and virtual reality, where users can smell.

To date, human-machine interface systems have been developed to simulate visual, auditory, and tactile sensations in virtual reality, and it has been difficult to design a system that simulates the sense of smell. Current olfactory interfaces are practically limited by the use of many bottled liquid fragrances, which are bulky and cumbersome, or require wired VR headsets. A wearable scent device that is lightweight, flexible, wireless, and capable of emitting a variety of scents and with programmable scent intensity has yet to be created.

This time, Xinge Yu and Yuhang Li et al. designed two types of wearable wireless interfaces for odor sensing. These interfaces include millimeter-scale odor-producing devices, the first interface is worn directly on the skin under the nose and is capable of emitting different scents, and the second interface is a kind of soft mask that can emit 9 different scents. The authors demonstrated interface customization with 30 scents (pineapple, ginger, green tea, caramel, fudge, etc.). This small scent-producing device includes scented paraffin wax, which can be heated to produce a specific scent quickly and accurately (in as little as 1.44 seconds).

The authors cite examples of applications of this research, such as alternative communication by transmitting scent messages, recalling emotional memories, and enhancing user interaction in a virtual reality world.

doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-37678-4

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