Olfactory Displays

We experimented with the control of Olfaction in Retail.  Like the analytical analysis described. 

Scientists Artificially Recreate Smells Using Olfactory Display

Tokyo Tech News (Japan), April 1, 2022

Researchers at Japan's Tokyo Institute of Technology have developed technology that can artificially replicate diverse scents by combining multiple odor components. The researchers defined 185 essential oils using mass spectrometry, then extracted 20 corresponding basis vectors via multidimensional data analysis. They produced various smells by mixing odor components corresponding to these basis vectors, and were able to emulate a variety of scents by adjusting the composition of odor elements. The team also used an olfactory display to generate scents instantly in the gaseous phase from 20 odor components. In a sensory test, people using the display were presented with seven typical essential oils derived from the 185 essential oils; the test subjects reported no significant difference between the original and reproduced smells. ... '

Smellit: Remotely Generating Smells

The remote digital delivery of smells and even fragrances was something we experimented with.   The intention was to be able to dial up an aroma at the shelf and selectively engage shoppers  in retail.  Unfortunately, despite the hype, the methods were unable to precisely deliver the smells.  Now,  another  attempt at the same idea.

Can AI Sniff the Roses, Predict the Smell?

Spent some time in examining artificial olfaction for the coffee business. Here we are looking at predicting what something smells or tastes like.   The general approach of predictive machine learning is well described below.  The broad idea of 'digital scent' has been broadly mentioned in this blog.

Using AI to Smell the Roses
UC Riverside News
Iqbal Pittalwala

Researchers at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) used machine learning to understand what a chemical smells like to humans. UCR's Anandasankar Ray and Joel Kowalewski developed a technique for a computer to learn chemical features that activate known human odorant receptors (ORs), then screened about 500,000 compounds for binding ligand molecules for 34 ORs. The team then concentrated on whether their OR activity-estimating algorithm could predict diverse perceptual qualities of odorants, and learned that such activity accurately predicted 146 distinct chemical percepts. Only a few ORs were required for prediction. Said Ray, "The machine learning algorithm can eventually predict how a new chemical will smell, even though we may initially not know if it smells like a lemon or a rose."  ... " 

How a Human Smell Receptor Works Is Finally Revealed

A space we worked for Coffee smells and tastes

How a Human Smell Receptor Works Is Finally Revealed

After decades of frustration, researchers have determined how an airborne scent molecule links to a human smell receptor.

Wynne Parry,  Contributing Writer, May 1, 2023  in Quantamagazine.

For the first time, researchers have determined how a human olfactory receptor captures an airborne scent molecule, the pivotal chemical event that triggers our sense of smell.

Whether it evokes roses or vanilla, cigarettes or gasoline, every scent starts with free-floating odor molecules that latch onto receptors in the nose. Multitudes of such unions produce the perception of the smells we love, loathe or tolerate. Researchers therefore want to know in granular detail how smell sensors detect and respond to odor molecules. Yet human smell receptors have resisted attempts to visualize how they work in detail — until now.

In a recent paper published in Nature, a team of researchers delineated the elusive three-dimensional structure of one of these receptors in the act of holding its quarry, a compound that contributes to the aroma of Swiss cheese and body odor.

“People have been puzzled about the actual structure of olfactory receptors for decades,” said Michael Schmuker, who uses chemical informatics to study olfaction at the University of Hertfordshire in England. Schmuker was not involved in the study, which he describes as “a real breakthrough.”

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He and others who study our sense of smell say that the reported structure represents a step toward better understanding how the nose and brain jointly wring from airborne chemicals the sensations that warn of rotten food, evoke childhood memories, help us find mates and serve other crucial functions.

The complexity of the chemistry that the nose detects has made olfaction particularly difficult to explain. Researchers think that human noses possess about 400 types of olfactory receptors, which are tasked with detecting a vastly larger number of odoriferous “volatiles,” molecules that vaporize readily, from the three-atom, rotten-egg-smelling hydrogen sulfide to the much larger, musky-scented muscone. (One recent estimate put the number of possible odor-bearing compounds at 40 billion or more.)

“In my mind, one of the most amazing things about olfaction is our ability to detect and discriminate such a wide array of volatiles,” said Hiroaki Matsunami, an olfaction researcher at Duke University and an author of the new study.

Caught in the Act

Perched on the surface of neurons in the nose, olfactory receptors change shape when they snag odor molecules. This reconfiguration prompts the neurons to send signals to the odor-processing parts of the brain. Researchers have long sought to see in detail how the interaction between receptor and odor molecule plays out. .... ' 

Digitizing, Measuring Smell

 Was long time interest of ours for product use.

Digitizing Smell: Using Molecular Maps to Understand Odor   Google Blog

Tuesday, September 6, 2022

Posted by Richard C. Gerkin, Google Research, and Alexander B. Wiltschko, Google

Did you ever try to measure a smell? …Until you can measure their likenesses and differences you can have no science of odor. If you are ambitious to found a new science, measure a smell.

— Alexander Graham Bell, 1914.

How can we measure a smell? Smells are produced by molecules that waft through the air, enter our noses, and bind to sensory receptors. Potentially billions of molecules can produce a smell, so figuring out which ones produce which smells is difficult to catalog or predict. Sensory maps can help us solve this problem. Color vision has the most familiar examples of these maps, from the color wheel we each learn in primary school to more sophisticated variants used to perform color correction in video production. While these maps have existed for centuries, useful maps for smell have been missing, because smell is a harder problem to crack: molecules vary in many more ways than photons do; data collection requires physical proximity between the smeller and smell (we don’t have good smell “cameras” and smell “monitors”); and the human eye only has three sensory receptors for color while the human nose has > 300 for odor. As a result, previous efforts to produce odor maps have failed to gain traction.

In 2019, we developed a graph neural network (GNN) model that began to explore thousands of examples of distinct molecules paired with the smell labels that they evoke, e.g., “beefy”, “floral”, or “minty”, to learn the relationship between a molecule’s structure and the probability that such a molecule would have each smell label. The embedding space of this model contains a representation of each molecule as a fixed-length vector describing that molecule in terms of its odor, much as the RGB value of a visual stimulus describes its color. ... '

VR System to Turn Smells into Temperatures

Here is quite an interesting play,  hacking your nose to get a temperature experience?  Skiing VR  experiences?  Thinking about the reality of this.    Temperature sensations .... how about others?

VR System Hacks Your Nose to Turn Smells Into Temperatures
IEEE Spectrum
Evan Ackerman
June 26, 2020

University of Chicago (UChicago) researchers have developed a power-efficient technique for generating different temperature sensations in virtual reality (VR) by essentially hacking the user's nose. The system disperses atomized chemicals to access the trigeminal nerve in the nose in order to replicate hot and cold sensations through odors. The device can produce discrete levels of hot and cold, and vary their intensity by tuning the frequency of the chemical dispersal. UChicago's Jas Brooks said, "Ultimately, any kind of new modalities for VR/AR (augmented reality) will only succeed if they are feasible in a mobile/untethered context. If we want to have thermal experiences that are portable, the device needs to be power-efficient."

Dreaming and Smelling

I don't remember recall having ever smelled anything in a dream. When I first saw this post Perchance to Dream, I thought it was about exposing people to smells and that being reflected in their dreams. Marketing extending beyond sleep?

No it is about people being exposed to smells during REM sleep and how they reacted in their dreams. Still very interesting. More posts on my favorite often hidden sense. Would like to have further seen brain scans during the same activities.

Drones Tracking Smells

 We did lots of work examining smells, and sought means to detect and track them. Here an update in the space. Could have used tested for forestry and agriculture  application.    See many posts on digital smell her over a number of years.

Smellicopter Drone Uses Live Moth Antenna to Track Scents

Robots are no match for the sensors insects are born with, but that doesn’t matter if we can just steal them   By Evan Ackerman  in IEEE Spectrum Robotics ...

Robot with Smell Sensor

 Most interesting, comparing the sensors 'rivaling those of dogs'.

TAU Robot Can 'Smell' Odors Using Biological Sensor  By The Jerusalem Post (Israel), January 20, 2023

The robot with the biological sensor. 

Researchers at Tel Aviv University have developed a biological odor sensor whose sensitivity rivals that of dogs.

Scientists at Israel's Tel Aviv University (TAU) have created a biological sensor to help robots detect and interpret odors., TAU's Yossi Yovel said the researchers mated the sensor to an electronic system and had it smell different odors while measuring electrical activity induced by each scent.

Said Yovel, "The system allowed us to detect each odor at the level of [an] insect's primary sensory organ. Then, in the second step, we used machine learning to create a 'library' of smells. "The algorithm can identify smells with 10,000 times greater sensitivity than a standard electronic device.

From The Jerusalem Post (Israel)    

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Interacting with Computers Through Smell

In our innovation spaces we also looked at 'communication', and sales via smell and taste.  Since at the time we were makers of some very large coffee blends.    We worked with simulations of blends and how people interacted with them via taste and aroma.  We even tested the ability to 'smell' with computers to test blends and model consumer reaction.  And their reaction in virtual reality settings.

Interacting With Computers Through Smell  By Sandrine Ceurstemont, Commissioned by CACM Staff, October 7, 2021

We typically interact with computers and virtual environments using vision, hearing, and touch, but there is growing interest in also incorporating smell, to replicate more closely how we interact with the real world.

Odors could help people feel more present in virtual reality settings, for example, while smell could also play a role in how we make rapid decisions or recall memories when using computers.

"The question is how can we harness the power of smell in this increasingly digital world," says Marianna Obrist, professor of multisensory interfaces at University College London in the U.K.

There are still challenges to overcome before smell can be widely used as a mode of human-computer interaction, though. A better understanding of how it could impact different aspects of behavior in virtual environments, for example, is needed.

"What we are trying to do is to understand the temporal and spatial diffusion of scent in order to really understand the effect on the user," says Obrist.

In recent work, Obrist and her colleagues investigated whether smell could help direct a person's attention in a virtual reality environment. They conducted experiments in which participants were presented with an abundance of visual stimuli, and had to pick out those that looked like mint leaves. Either sounds, smells, or both were incorporated into the virtual scene, and were emitted from different positions  in the virtual environment, in order to learn whether they could help guide a person towards the mint leaf icons.

Participants were assessed based on the number of mint leaves they spotted and where they were located. The position of each person's head was tracked as they completed the task, to determine the direction they were looking and whether that matched up with the location from which a scent or sound was being emitted.

Obrist and her team found participants typically directed their attention to the source of a sound or smell. Furthermore, they seemed to explore the left side more thoroughly when a sensation was delivered from the left, compared to when it originated from the right side. The researchers think that could be because all the participants were from cultures that read from left to right. "That might have some effect which would need to be accounted for in the future," says Obrist.

They also found differences in how effectively people focused their attention when sound or smell were used on their own, compared to when both modalities were combined. "The integration of sound and smell definitely produced the best results," says Obrist. ... ' 

A Retail Drama

Yesterday I walked Costco with a cart. I take more than a casual interest in these kinds of excursions. I look for assortment, costs, technologies and shelf design. I also view the store from the perspective of a 'foodie'. What got me here? What is keeping me here? At Costco, can I possibly use that Jumbo size before it becomes stale?

I had a handful of mailed Costco coupons. Somehow I did not get them in the mail, but pulled them from a returned cart. I was standing in front of a large display of Cascade dish washing packets (made by, well you-can-guess). I had a coupon for $2.50-off of a 90 count package. I was about to toss a box in my cart, when a woman stepped in front of me. She breathlessly said that a box of Electrasol packets (made by Reckitt Benckiser), 100 count, without a coupon, would cost two dollars less. I was about to make some remark about having special reasons to buy the Cascade brand. But I kept my mouth shut.

I was amazed by her merchandising enthusiasm. Turns out she was a 'demonstrator' at a table nearby and was giving out Electrasol samples. I stopped nearby to watch. I saw her do her act several more times, everyone bought. 100% conversion. I bought the Electrasol. Yes, you can argue quality, but I did not have my lab with me. I had to retreat to the second moment of truth for tests. I had to sheepishly explain the change of brand to my wife as competitive intelligence.

I have seen these human demonstrators working in large supermarkets in China. Dozens of 'demonstrators' standing in front of the shelves to talk up a product. Sometimes so many that it is hard to get to the product. They work. Some manufacturers have tried to stop funding these kinds of efforts there. Sales have dropped. A mixture of cultural shopper expectations and bad publicity.

Great example of in store, shopper marketing. Technology can work, but not as well as a person selling. This is not a pre 1916 Piggly Wiggly. Someone should hire this woman as a consultant. She had the kind of enthusiasm that needs to be translated into shopper marketing to make it work. Sold me.

Update: Not sure who will end up reading this, but just for completeness ... after using the Electrasol product for a few weeks it is clearly inferior. Cascade cleans better and smells better. The merchandising performance was great, but you have to follow with a great product.

Social Media Success

What does social media success look like?  " ... While firms are realizing that social media networks harbor the potential to provide intelligence and engage customers, it can be hard to form a picture of what success looks, feels, and smells like ... "

How a Human Smell Receptor Works Is Finally Revealed

 Previously mentioned, more data ...  A space we did much in given our products ... 

How a Human Smell Receptor Works Is Finally Revealed

After decades of frustration, researchers have determined how an airborne scent molecule links to shapeshifting olfactory receptors in the nose.

FOR THE FIRST time, researchers have determined how a human olfactory receptor captures an airborne scent molecule, the pivotal chemical event that triggers our sense of smell.

Whether it evokes roses or vanilla, cigarettes or gasoline, every scent starts with free-floating odor molecules that latch onto receptors in the nose. Multitudes of such unions produce our perception of the smells we love, loathe, or tolerate. Researchers therefore want to know in granular detail how smell sensors detect and respond to odor molecules. Yet human smell receptors have resisted attempts to visualize how they work in detail—until now.

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research develop­ments and trends in mathe­matics and the physical and life sciences.

In a recent paper published in Nature    https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-05798-y , a team of researchers delineated the elusive three-dimensional structure of one of these receptors in the act of holding its quarry, a compound that contributes to the aroma of Swiss cheese and body odor.  ... ' 

Smelling, Touching Take Center Stage in Metaverse

More than vision?  

Smelling, Touching Take Center Stage in Metaverse

Associated Press  Haleluya Hadero; Rio Yamat, January 8, 2023

Metaverse technologies unveiled at the 2023 Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2023) included sensory products that can replicate sensations and even odors in virtual reality (VR). VR developer OVR Technology demonstrated a headset containing a cartridge with eight smells that can be combined into different scents, for release later this year. The company is marketing the product as a kind of digital spa combined with Instagram, with the goal of helping consumers relax. Aurora Townsend at VR game developer FireFlare said her team aims to enhance the company's upcoming Planet Theta VR dating application with touch and other sensations. Metaverse expert Matthew Ball doubts such products will see wider use in coming years, outside of fields with large budgets and specific needs like bomb disposal units using haptics, and medical workers.  ... ' 

Dating Sites and Smell

In Discovery. An approach that makes sense, but without a practical aroma interface, difficult to implement:

" ... Two companies, Basisnote and Scientific Match, are developing technology to match couples based on the genetic components of the human immune system -- and their odor.

Studies have linked odor to immune systems and shown that people are most likely to be attracted to the smells of those who have different histocompatibility genes than their own. While those who have similar immune systems tend to not be attracted to each others' odors ... "

Detecting Odors

I often mention research in this area because we spent considerable time looking at the idea of an 'artificial nose' to effectively  test quality in products, especially coffee, but in other areas as well.    Here more in the area.  Note the use of 'Neuromorphic', or brain-inspired chips to address the problem.

Intel Trains Neuromorphic Chip to Detect Odors
in VentureBeat
By Kyle Wiggers

Intel and Cornell University researchers have trained Intel's Loihi neuromorphic processor to identify 10 materials from their odors, demonstrating how neuromorphic computing could be applied to detect precursor smells and potentially find explosives and narcotics, diagnose diseases, and notice signs of smoke and carbon monoxide. The chip was trained by configuring the circuit schematic of biological olfaction, using a dataset compiling the activity of 72 chemical sensors in response to various scents. The researchers said the method kept Loihi's memory of the scents intact, and the chip has "superior" recognition accuracy compared with conventional techniques. Said Intel's Nabil Imam, "This work is a prime example of contemporary research at the crossroads of neuroscience and artificial intelligence and demonstrates Loihi's potential to provide important sensing capabilities that could benefit various industries." ... '

Wikify Fact Checking

Can you use a Wiki to do true fact checking? A USC journalism Prof attempt. I don't think it is working in the WIkipedia for anything that smells even a tiny amount controversial. The nascent site is called WIkiFactCheck. Good luck.

Cyber Agriculture

My own strong interest and background in botany makes me consider this closely, consider the implications.  In particular have been experimenting with basil flavors for years.   While the smells of basils can be considerable, they often do not perform as distinctly in dishes.   Can we program in robust flavors?  Following.

MIT’s ‘cyber-agriculture’ optimizes basil flavors   By Devin Coldewey @techcrunch

The days when you could simply grow a basil plant from a seed by placing it on your windowsill and watering it regularly are gone — there’s no point now that machine learning-optimized hydroponic “cyber-agriculture” has produced a superior plant with more robust flavors. The future of pesto is here.

This research didn’t come out of a desire to improve sauces, however. It’s a study from MIT’s Media Lab and the University of Texas at Austin aimed at understanding how to both improve and automate farming.

In the study, published today in PLOS ONE, the question being asked was whether a growing environment could find and execute a growing strategy that resulted in a given goal — in this case, basil with stronger flavors.

Such a task is one with numerous variables to modify — soil type, plant characteristics, watering frequency and volume, lighting and so on — and a measurable outcome: concentration of flavor-producing molecules. That means it’s a natural fit for a machine learning model, which from that variety of inputs can make a prediction as to which will produce the best output.

“We’re really interested in building networked tools that can take a plant’s experience, its phenotype, the set of stresses it encounters, and its genetics, and digitize that to allow us to understand the plant-environment interaction,” explained MIT’s Caleb Harper in a news release. The better you understand those interactions, the better you can design the plant’s lifecycle, perhaps increasing yield, improving flavor or reducing waste.  .... " 

Smells Like a Billion Bucks

In Fast Company. A teaser of an insider's look into Procter and what it takes to be a billion dollar brand. And you have to check out the bizarre Old Spice site, it's not your old sailor kit anymore.

Martin Lindstrom on Brands at FMI

We saw Martin Lindstrom author of the book BrandSense speak at FMI. Have read this book, but this is the first time I had heard him speak. He is quite dynamic, moving through the audience and up and down from the stage. That can be fun, but also a bit distracting, making you swivel your neck just a few times too often. He uses lots of slides, but fairly few words on them. Lindstrom also has a useful site. which has videos on brand building and you can sign up for a newsletter.

Lindstrom's pitch is all about how all the senses are important to brands. I have been exposed to lots of research about using all the senses in retail environments, so I very much like his proposition. All senses are important, but some are harder to control than others. Sight, for example is something we use often, and we can readily manipulate brand images using vision. Many of Lindstrom's examples use aspects of color and form.

He also suggests that we often have 'Proustian' episodes where the smell of environments profoundly influences us, modified by age and perhaps when and where we grew up. I have seen where the smells of environments have been used to establish convincing contexts. Still, this kind of control is very different, the way broad emotional state is different from making calculated decisions. I would suggest it's often barely controllable at all. While we have learned how to control sounds in three dimensions, smell is often at the mercy of air conditioning systems.

Lindstrom shows many brand examples, and how aspects of smell, taste, sound and vision (but not often touch) are increasingly being used to define a brand. And also how the most successful brands are defined by multiple senses. Lindstrom has also developed a simple graphical means to show the contribution of each of the senses. In some of his site videos he mentions some of the neuromarketing analysis being done with fmri brain scans, but that was not mentioned in the talk. He did not include any background about the statistics he references, such as how .. smell effects us up to 75% more than any other sense ... .

I think there is much to be done in utilizing all the senses in the definition of brands, and also in how brands are linked to marketing and merchandising. Lindstrom show lots of examples, and constructs a means to broadly analyze the influence of the senses. I did not come away with much understanding of what to really do to fully utilize all the senses. There is still much to do to get that place, it does not appear the problem has been solved beyond finding intriguing examples.