Odors In Virtual Worlds

 Again, a space we experimented in, especially with regards to coffee.  Here more VR related.

Scientists have come up with a new way to introduce odors into virtual reality via small, wireless interfaces. 

Creating smells in virtual reality is a vexing problem that has prevented consumer VR devices from offering a full sensory experience in most settings. “People can touch in VR,” says Xinge Yu, a professor at the department of biomedical engineering at the City University of Hong Kong and the lead author of the new paper, published today in Nature Communications. “And of course, you can see and hear in VR. But how about smell and taste?”

Previous efforts to create odors in VR have involved multiple wires, messy liquids, and bulky contraptions that don’t lend themselves to home use. 

To tackle the problem, Yu and his co-author, Yuhang Li of Beihang University in Beijing (both of whom have backgrounds designing flexible electronics), developed two wearable interfaces. One can adhere to the skin between the nose and mouth like a bandage; the other straps on beneath a headset like a face mask.

Both types of interfaces use miniaturized odor generators, a grid of tiny containers filled with perfumed paraffin wax. When a heat source beneath the wax is activated, the wax heats up, essentially becoming a scented candle capable of reproducing multiple odors within 1.44 seconds, according to Yu and Li. When the experience is over, a copper coil kicks a magnet to tamp down on the wax and cool down, ending the scent.

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The higher the heat, the stronger the odor and the more easily identifiable the smell, Yu says. That means that interfaces can get very hot—up to 60° C (140° F), which is dangerous for human skin. But Yu says the interface is safe because of an “open” design that lets hot air escape, along with a piece of silicone that forms a barrier between the skin and the actual device.

In a test with 11 volunteers, the interface that goes between nose and mouth was judged safe so long as it was at least 1.5 millimeters from the nose, with a temperature at the skin’s surface of 32.2° C, or 90° F—less than human body temperature. Yu realizes, though, that a scalding hot interface attached to your face might not feel safe enough to use, and he said he and Li were testing ways to make the interface run at lower temperatures or cool down more efficiently.

Yu and Li are not alone in trying to create seamless olfactory experiences in VR. At this year's CES, OVR Technology announced that it would release a headset containing a cartridge with eight “primary” aromas designed to mix and match. 

“This is quite an exciting development,” says Jas Brooks, a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago’s Human-Computer Integration Lab who has studied chemical interfaces and smell. “It’s tackling a core problem with smell in VR: How do we miniaturize this, make it not messy, and not use liquid?”

Artists have long attempted to bring scents into entertainment. In 1960, “Smell-O-Vision” made its first and only appearance with the film Scent of Mystery, which released odors during key plot points via air conditioning. But the effort bombed: during screenings, scents were either delayed or too faint to notice. 

These new interfaces are a notable development that could change how we experience VR. Olfaction is a powerful sense and a prerequisite for our mouths to detect flavor. The possibilities range from the obvious—sniffing a virtual flower field or inhaling VR food—to some less obvious applications. For example, perfumeries could test fragrances virtually.

Medically, scent-equipped VR could be helpful for people who have anosmia, or an inability to smell, according to Yu. Scents can also be therapeutic for patients with memory issues and might even help with mood. Yu told me he noticed he felt happier when he used the green tea scent in his tests. He realized that the smell was nostalgic: “When I was little, I’d have some chocolate with a green tea flavor,” he recalled. “I still remember peeling off the wrapper, and how I loved the smell.”   ... ' 

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. ... '

Smell as Useful Sense

We spent much time examining the power of smell in retail.    Worth a close look. 

Virtual Reality Stinks Because It Does Not Smell

By Wired, August 2, 2022

Illustration shows person wearing virtual reality goggles and uses smoke to imply an odor.

Playing with smell can render a strange world more human, draw us into exploring new environments, and imprint that experience with emotional force and stakes.

Smell is virtual reality's (VR) blind spot. Most VR technologists do not even notice the lack of smells or worry about its consequences, despite the fact that convincing smell technology is becoming available.

Smell is arguably our realest sense—the sense that most grounds us in reality. If virtual reality wants to deliver on its potential, it needs to wake up and smell its nauseating scentlessness.  .... 

Full article in Wired   

Seeing How Odor Is Processed in the Brain

Worked with the use of Odors for consumer interaction.   Never went far, now a breakthrough?  Very interesting details.

From ACM TechNews | June 3, 2022

Researchers created an odor delivery device, then used machine learning to analyze electroencephalograms to determine how the brain processes scents.

University of Tokyo (Japan)

Researchers at Japan's University of Tokyo (UTokyo) created an odor delivery device, then used machine learning (ML) to analyze electroencephalograms (EEGs) to determine how the brain processes scents.

Their device can dispense 10 unique odors to participants, who rated the pleasantness of each as EEG caps recorded their brain signals.  The ML analysis ascertained when and where the range of odors was processed in the brain, with high temporal resolution.

Said UTokyo's Mugihiko Kato, "We were surprised that we could detect signals from presented odors from very early EEG responses, as quickly as 100 milliseconds after odor onset, suggesting that representation of odor information in the brain occurs rapidly." ... 

During the EEG measurement, participants were asked to rate the pleasantness of the odors. They then evaluated the odors ranging from citrus and tea leaves, to mothballs and wet dog.  ... 

From University of Tokyo (Japan)     

View Full Article

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. ... '