research paper on digital smell technology

Handbook of Human Computer Interaction pp 1–31 Cite as

Smell and Taste-Based Interactions Enabled Through Advances in Digital Technology

• Patricia Cornelio 4 , 5 ,
• Chi Thanh Vi 6 , 8 ,
• Giada Brianza 6 ,
• Emanuela Maggioni 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 &
• Marianna Obrist 4  
• Living reference work entry
• Later version available View entry history
• First Online: 20 October 2023

116 Accesses

Innovations around smell and taste interfaces are quickly emerging in the literature and practice, they include fully controllable sensory delivery mechanisms, wearable devices that allow portable applications, and novel systems that create digital smell and taste experiences. However, with the rapid development of such innovations, researchers and practitioners might forget current challenges in their design and evaluation, overlooking psychological understanding of human olfactory and gustatory perception. In this chapter, we review current advancements around smell and taste interfaces through a human-computer interaction lens. For each technology reviewed, we describe the type of stimulation ( chemical, electrical, and thermal ), the delivery mechanisms proposed as well as their key features and weaknesses. We then describe two interaction cases in detail for each of the two senses. Interaction case 1 focuses on the sense of smell and is based on the use of pressurized air smell delivery mechanisms. Interaction case 2 focuses on the sense of taste and is based on using acoustic levitation as taste delivery mechanisms. Both these case examples illustrate the potential for controlling different parameters, its novelty and capabilities, but also challenges. For each interaction case, we describe the evolution of different interfaces/devices that lead into a reflection on future directions of smell and taste stimulation aiming to provide researchers and practitioners with relevant parameters to design future olfactory and gustatory, and ultimately multisensory interfaces and experiences.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution .

Ablart D (2017) Integration of touch and taste with interactive media. In: Adjunct publication of the 2017 ACM international conference on interactive experiences for TV and online video. https://doi.org/10.1145/3084289.3084294

Chapter   Google Scholar  

Altarriba Bertran F, Jhaveri S, Lutz R, Isbister K, Wilde D (2019a) Making sense of human-food interaction. In: Proceedings of the 2019 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300908

Altarriba Bertran F, Wilde D, Berezvay E, Isbister K (2019b) Playful human-food interaction research: state of the art and future directions. In: Proceedings of the annual symposium on computer-human interaction in play. https://doi.org/10.1145/3311350.3347155

Amores J, Maes P (2017) Essence: olfactory interfaces for unconscious influence of mood and cognitive performance. In: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems. Association for Computing Machinery, Denver, pp 28–34. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3026004

Amores J, Hernandez J, Dementyev A, Wang X, Maes P (2018) Bioessence: a wearable olfactory display that monitors cardio-respiratory information to support mental wellbeing. In: 2018 40th annual international conference of the IEEE engineering in medicine and biology society (EMBC). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/EMBC.2018.8513221

Andrade MA, Bernassau AL, Adamowski JC (2016) Acoustic levitation of a large solid sphere. Appl Phys Lett 109(4):044101. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4959862

Article   Google Scholar  

Arnold P, Khot RA, Mueller FF (2018) “You better eat to survive”: exploring cooperative eating in virtual reality games. In: Proceedings of the twelfth international conference on tangible, embedded, and embodied interaction. Association for Computing Machinery, Stockholm, pp 398–408. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173225.3173238

Brianza G, Tajadura-Jiménez A, Maggioni E, Pittera D, Bianchi-Berthouze N, Obrist M (2019) As light as your scent: effects of smell and sound on body image perception. In: IFIP conference on human-computer interaction. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29390-1\_10

Brianza G, Cornelio P, Maggioni E, Obrist M (2021) Sniff before you act: exploration of scent-feature associations for designing future interactions. In: IFIP conference on human-computer interaction. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85616-8\_17

Brooks J, Nagels S, Lopes P (2020) Trigeminal-based temperature illusions. In: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems. Association for Computing Machinery, pp 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376806

Brooks J, Teng S-Y, Wen J, Nith R, Nishida J, Lopes P (2021) Stereo-smell via electrical trigeminal stimulation. In: Proceedings of the 2021 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445300

Carr M, Haar A, Amores J, Lopes P, Bernal G, Vega T, Rosello O, Jain A, Maes P (2020) Dream engineering: simulating worlds through sensory stimulation. Conscious Cogn 83:102955. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2020.102955

Cheok AD, Karunanayaka K (2022) Electric smell: towards electrically reproducing artificial smell sensations. https://doi.org/10.36227/techrxiv.19228449.v1

Chisik Y, Pons P, Jaen J (2018) Gastronomy meets ludology: towards a definition of what it means to play with your (digital) food. In: Proceedings of the 2018 annual symposium on computer-human interaction in play companion extended abstracts. https://doi.org/10.1145/3270316.3272056

CNET (2017) Royal Caribbean’s high-tech ship lets you be lazier than ever. 2021. Available from: https://www.cnet.com/news/royal-caribbeans-high-tech-ship-lets-you-be-lazier-than-ever-vr-self-driving-shuttles/

Cornelio P, Maggioni E, Brianza G, Subramanian S, Obrist M (2020) SmellControl: the study of sense of agency in smell. In: Proceedings of the 2020 international conference on multimodal interaction. Association for Computing Machinery, Virtual Event, pp 470–480. https://doi.org/10.1145/3382507.3418810

Cornelio P, Velasco C, Obrist M (2021) Multisensory integration as per technological advances: a review. Front Neurosci:614. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2021.652611

Cruz A, Green BG (2000) Thermal stimulation of taste. Nature 403(6772):889–892. https://doi.org/10.1038/35002581

Deng J, Olivier P, Mueller FF (2021) Design of cyber food: beginning to understand food as computational artifact. In: Extended abstracts of the 2021 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems. Association for Computing Machinery, Yokohama, p 293. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411763.3451687

Deng J, Olivier P, Andres J, Ellis K, Wee R, Mueller FF (2022) Logic bonbon: exploring food as computational artifact. In: Proceedings of the 2022 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems. Association for Computing Machinery, New Orleans, p 47. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3501926

Desai N, Maggioni E, Obrist M, Orlu M (2022) Scent-delivery devices as a digital healthcare tool for olfactory training: a pilot focus group study in Parkinson’s disease patients. Digit Health 8:20552076221129061. https://doi.org/10.1177/20552076221129061

Dmitrenko D, Maggioni E, Obrist M (2017a) OSpace: towards a systematic exploration of olfactory interaction spaces. In: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM international conference on interactive surfaces and spaces. https://doi.org/10.1145/3132272.3134121

Dmitrenko D, Maggioni E, Vi CT, Obrist M (2017b) What did I sniff? Mapping scents onto driving-related messages. In: Proceedings of the 9th international conference on automotive user interfaces and interactive vehicular applications. Association for Computing Machinery, Oldenburg, pp 154–163. https://doi.org/10.1145/3122986.3122998

Dmitrenko D, Maggioni E, Obrist M (2018) I smell trouble: using multiple scents to convey driving-relevant information. In: Proceedings of the 20th ACM international conference on multimodal interaction. Association for Computing Machinery, Boulder, pp 234–238. https://doi.org/10.1145/3242969.3243015

Dmitrenko D, Maggioni E, Brianza G, Holthausen BE, Walker BN, Obrist M (2020) CARoma therapy: pleasant scents promote safer driving, better mood, and improved well-being in angry drivers. In: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems. Association for Computing Machinery, pp 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376176

Dozio N, Maggioni E, Pittera D, Gallace A, Obrist M (2021) May I smell your attention: exploration of smell and sound for visuospatial attention in virtual reality. Front Psychol 12. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.671470

Ehrlichman H, Bastone L (1992) Olfaction and emotion. Science of olfaction. Springer, pp 410–438. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-2836-3\_15

Book   Google Scholar  

Ehrlichman H, Brown S, Zhu J, Warrenburg S (1995) Startle reflex modulation during exposure to pleasant and unpleasant odors. Psychophysiology 32(2):150–154. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8986.1995.tb03306.x

Ernst MO, Bülthoff HH (2004) Merging the senses into a robust percept. Trends Cogn Sci 8(4):162–169. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2004.02.002

Farooq U, Grudin J (2016) Human-computer integration. Interactions 23(6):26–32. https://doi.org/10.1145/3001896

Fushimi T, Hill T, Marzo A, Drinkwater B (2018) Nonlinear trapping stiffness of mid-air single-axis acoustic levitators. Appl Phys Lett 113(3):034102. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5034116

Gil H, Son H, Kim JR, Oakley I (2018) Whiskers: exploring the use of ultrasonic haptic cues on the face. In: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems. Association for Computing Machinery, Montreal, p 658. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174232

Haggard P (2017) Sense of agency in the human brain. Nat Rev Neurosci 18(4):196. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn.2017.14

Haggard P, Tsakiris M (2009) The experience of agency: feelings, judgments, and responsibility. Curr Dir Psychol Sci 18(4):242–246. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2009.01644.x

Hasegawa K, Qiu L, Shinoda H (2018) Midair ultrasound fragrance rendering. IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph 24(4):1477–1485. https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2018.2794118

Herz RS, Cupchik GC (1995) The emotional distinctiveness of odor-evoked memories. Chem Senses 20(5):517–528. https://doi.org/10.1093/chemse/20.5.517

Hirayama R, Martinez Plasencia D, Masuda N, Subramanian S (2019) A volumetric display for visual, tactile and audio presentation using acoustic trapping. Nature 575(7782):320–323. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1739-5

Hirota K, Ito Y, Amemiya T, Ikei Y (2013) Presentation of odor in multi-sensory theater. In: International conference on virtual, augmented and mixed reality. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39420-1\_39

Holbrook EH, Puram SV, See RB, Tripp AG, Nair DG (2019) Induction of smell through transethmoid electrical stimulation of the olfactory bulb. Int Forum Allergy Rhinol 9(2):158–164. https://doi.org/10.1002/alr.22237

Hupfeld A, Rodden T (2012) Laying the table for HCI: uncovering ecologies of domestic food consumption. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2207694

InformedHealth (2011) How does our sense of taste work? Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG), Cologne. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK279408/

Ishimaru T, Miwa T, Shimada T, Furukawa M (2002) Electrically stimulated olfactory evoked potential in olfactory disturbance. Ann Otol Rhinol Laryngol 111(6):518–522. https://doi.org/10.1177/000348940211100607

Jackowski-Ashley L, Memoli G, Caleap M, Slack N, Drinkwater BW, Subramanian S (2017) Haptics and directional audio using acoustic metasurfaces. In: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM international conference on interactive surfaces and spaces. https://doi.org/10.1145/3132272.3132285

Jaller C, Andersen NB, Nilsson NC, Paisa R, Damsbo M, Serafin S (2021) MARTYR: exploring ingredients of virtual dining experiences. In: 2021 IEEE conference on virtual reality and 3D user interfaces abstracts and workshops (VRW). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/VRW52623.2021.00049

Lin Y-J, Punpongsanon P, Wen X, Iwai D, Sato K, Obrist M, Mueller S (2020) FoodFab: creating food perception illusions using food 3D printing. In: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376421

Low KE (2006) Presenting the self, the social body, and the olfactory: managing smells in everyday life experiences. Sociol Perspect 49(4):607–631. https://doi.org/10.1525/sop.2006.49.4.607

Maggioni E, Cobden R, Dmitrenko D, Obrist M (2018) Smell-O-message: integration of olfactory notifications into a messaging application to improve users’ performance. In: Proceedings of the 20th ACM international conference on multimodal interaction. Association for Computing Machinery, Boulder, pp 45–54. https://doi.org/10.1145/3242969.3242975

Maggioni E, Cobden R, Obrist M (2019) OWidgets: a toolkit to enable smell-based experience design. Int J Hum Comput Stud 130:248–260. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2019.06.014

Maggioni E, Cobden R, Dmitrenko D, Hornbæk K, Obrist M (2020) SMELL SPACE: mapping out the olfactory design space for novel interactions. ACM Trans Comput Hum Interact 27(5):36. https://doi.org/10.1145/3402449

Mahmut MK, Stevenson RJ, Stephen I (2019) Do women love their partner’s smell? Exploring women’s preferences for and identification of male partner and non-partner body odor. Physiol Behav 210:112517. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physbeh.2019.04.006

Marzo A, Barnes A, Drinkwater BW (2017) TinyLev: a multi-emitter single-axis acoustic levitator. Rev Sci Instrum 88(8):085105. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4989995

Marzo A, Caleap M, Drinkwater BW (2018) Acoustic virtual vortices with tunable orbital angular momentum for trapping of mie particles. Phys Rev Lett 120(4):044301. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.044301

Maynes-Aminzade D (2005) Edible bits: seamless interfaces between people, data and food. In: Conference on human factors in computing systems (CHI’05)-extended abstracts, Citeseer

Google Scholar  

Miyashita H (2020) Taste display that reproduces tastes measured by a taste sensor. In: Proceedings of the 33rd annual ACM symposium on user interface software and technology. Association for Computing Machinery, pp 1085–1093. https://doi.org/10.1145/3379337.3415852

Moore JW, Wegner DM, Haggard P (2009) Modulating the sense of agency with external cues. Conscious Cogn 18(4):1056–1064. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2009.05.004

Mueller FF, Lopes P, Strohmeier P, Ju W, Seim C, Weigel M, Nanayakkara S, Obrist M, Li Z, Delfa J (2020) Next steps for human-computer integration. In: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376242

Murer M, Aslan I, Tscheligi M (2013) LOLLio: exploring taste as playful modality. In: Proceedings of the 7th international conference on tangible, embedded and embodied interaction – TEI’13. https://doi.org/10.1145/2460625.2460675

Mystakidis S (2022) Metaverse. Encyclopedia 2(1):486–497. https://www.mdpi.com/2673-8392/2/1/31

Nakaizumi F, Noma H, Hosaka K, Yanagida Y (2006) SpotScents: a novel method of natural scent delivery using multiple scent projectors. In: IEEE virtual reality conference (VR 2006). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/VR.2006.122

Narumi T, Kajinami T, Tanikawa T, Hirose M (2010a) Meta cookie. In: ACM SIGGRAPH 2010 posters on – SIGGRAPH’10. https://doi.org/10.1145/1836821.1836839

Narumi T, Kajinami T, Tanikawa T, Hirose M (2010b) Meta cookie. In: ACM SIGGRAPH 2010 posters. Association for Computing Machinery, Los Angeles, p 143. https://doi.org/10.1145/1836845.1836998

Norasikin MA, Martinez Plasencia D, Polychronopoulos S, Memoli G, Tokuda Y, Subramanian S (2018) SoundBender: dynamic acoustic control behind obstacles. In: Proceedings of the 31st annual ACM symposium on user interface software and technology. https://doi.org/10.1145/3242587.3242590

Norasikin MA, Martinez-Plasencia D, Memoli G, Subramanian S (2019) SonicSpray: a technique to reconfigure permeable mid-air displays. In: Proceedings of the 2019 ACM international conference on interactive surfaces and spaces. https://doi.org/10.1145/3343055.3359704

Obrist M, Comber R, Subramanian S, Piqueras-Fiszman B, Velasco C, Spence C (2014a) Temporal, affective, and embodied characteristics of taste experiences: a framework for design. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems. Association for Computing Machinery, Toronto, pp 2853–2862. https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557007

Obrist M, Tuch AN, Hornbaek K (2014b) Opportunities for odor: experiences with smell and implications for technology. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems. Association for Computing Machinery, Toronto, pp 2843–2852. https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557008

Obrist M, Tu Y, Yao L, Velasco C (2019) Space food experiences: designing passenger’s eating experiences for future space travel scenarios. Front Comput Sci 1:3. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomp.2019.00003

Plasencia DM, Hirayama R, Montano-Murillo R, Subramanian S (2020) GS-PAT: high-speed multi-point sound-fields for phased arrays of transducers. ACM Trans Graph 39(4):138. https://doi.org/10.1145/3386569.3392492

Plattig K-H, Innitzer J (1976) Taste qualities elicited by electric stimulation of single human tongue papillae. Pflugers Arch 361(2):115–120. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00583454

Porter J, Craven B, Khan RM, Chang S-J, Kang I, Judkewitz B, Volpe J, Settles G, Sobel N (2007) Mechanisms of scent-tracking in humans. Nat Neurosci 10(1):27–29. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1819

Purves D, Cabeza R, Huettel SA, LaBar KS, Platt ML, Woldorff MG, Brannon EM (2008) Cognitive neuroscience. Sinauer Associates, Inc, Sunderland

Ranasinghe N, Do E (2016a) Digital lollipop: studying electrical stimulation on the human tongue to simulate taste sensations. ACM Trans Multimed Comput Commun Appl 13:1–22. https://doi.org/10.1145/2996462

Ranasinghe N, Do EY-L (2016b) Virtual sweet: simulating sweet sensation using thermal stimulation on the tip of the tongue. In: Proceedings of the 29th annual symposium on user interface software and technology. Association for Computing Machinery, Tokyo, pp 127–128. https://doi.org/10.1145/2984751.2985729

Ranasinghe N, Karunanayaka K, Cheok AD, Fernando ONN, Nii H, Gopalakrishnakone P (2011) Digital taste and smell communication. In: Proceedings of the 6th international conference on body area networks. https://doi.org/10.4108/icst.bodynets.2011.247067

Ranasinghe N, Cheok AD, Nakatsu R (2012) Taste/IP: the sensation of taste for digital communication. In: Proceedings of the 14th ACM international conference on multimodal interaction. https://doi.org/10.1145/2388676.2388768

Ranasinghe N, Cheok A, Nakatsu R, Do EY-L (2013) Simulating the sensation of taste for immersive experiences. In: Proceedings of the 2013 ACM international workshop on immersive media experiences. https://doi.org/10.1145/2512142.2512148

Ranasinghe N, Lee K-Y, Suthokumar G, Do EY-L (2014a) Taste+ digitally enhancing taste sensations of food and beverages. In: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM international conference on multimedia. ACM

Ranasinghe N, Lee K-Y, Suthokumar G, Do EY-L (2014b) Taste+: digitally enhancing taste sensations of food and beverages. In: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM international conference on multimedia. Association for Computing Machinery, Orlando, pp 737–738. https://doi.org/10.1145/2647868.2654878

Ranasinghe N, Suthokumar G, Lee K-Y, Do EY-L (2015) Digital flavor: towards digitally simulating virtual flavors. In: Proceedings of the 2015 ACM on international conference on multimodal interaction. Association for Computing Machinery, Seattle, pp 139–146. https://doi.org/10.1145/2818346.2820761

Ranasinghe N, Lee K-Y, Suthokumar G, Do EY-L (2016) Virtual ingredients for food and beverages to create immersive taste experiences. Multimed Tools Appl 75(20):12291–12309. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-015-3162-8

Ranasinghe N, Jain P, Karwita S, Do EY-L (2017a) Virtual lemonade: let’s teleport your lemonade! In: Proceedings of the tenth international conference on tangible, embedded, and embodied interaction – TEI’17. https://doi.org/10.1145/3024969.3024977

Ranasinghe N, Nguyen TNT, Liangkun Y, Lin L-Y, Tolley D, Do EY-L (2017b) Vocktail: a virtual cocktail for pairing digital taste, smell, and color sensations. In: Proceedings of the 25th ACM international conference on multimedia. https://doi.org/10.1145/3123266.3123440

Ranasinghe N, Jain P, Tram NTN, Koh KCR, Tolley D, Karwita S, Lien-Ya L, Liangkun Y, Shamaiah K, Tung CEW, Yen CC, Do EY-L (2018) Season traveller: multisensory narration for enhancing the virtual reality experience. In: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems. Association for Computing Machinery, Montreal, p 577. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174151

Rinaldi A (2007) The scent of life: the exquisite complexity of the sense of smell in animals and humans. EMBO Rep 8(7):629–633. https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.embor.7401029

Risso P, Covarrubias Rodriguez M, Bordegoni M, Gallace A (2018) Development and testing of a small-size olfactometer for the perception of food and beverages in humans. Front Digit Humanit 5:7. https://doi.org/10.3389/fdigh.2018.00007

Samshir NA, Johari N, Karunanayaka K, David Cheok A (2016) Thermal sweet taste machine for multisensory internet. In: Proceedings of the fourth international conference on human agent interaction. https://doi.org/10.1145/2974804.2980503

Sand A, Rakkolainen I, Isokoski P, Kangas J, Raisamo R, Palovuori K (2015) Head-mounted display with mid-air tactile feedback. In: Proceedings of the 21st ACM symposium on virtual reality software and technology. https://doi.org/10.1145/2821592.2821593

Schacter D, Gilbert D, Wegner D, Hood BM (2011) Psychology: European edition. Macmillan International Higher Education, Basingstoke

Seah SA, Martinez Plasencia D, Bennett PD, Karnik A, Otrocol VS, Knibbe J, Cockburn A, Subramanian S (2014) SensaBubble: a chrono-sensory mid-air display of sight and smell. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557087

Shams L, Beierholm U (2011) Humans’ multisensory perception, from integration to segregation, follows Bayesian inference. In: Sensory cue integration. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 251–262

Shen V, Shultz C, Harrison C (2022) Mouth haptics in VR using a headset ultrasound phased array. In: CHI conference on human factors in computing systems. Association for Computing Machinery, New Orleans, p 275. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3501960

Shepherd GM (2004) The human sense of smell: are we better than we think? PLoS Biol 2(5):e146. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.0020146

Spence C, Obrist M, Velasco C, Ranasinghe N (2017) Digitizing the chemical senses: possibilities & pitfalls. Int J Hum Comput Stud 107:62–74. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2017.06.003

Trimmer C, Mainland J (2017) The Olfactory system. In: Conn’s translational neuroscience. Elsevier, pp 363–377. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-802381-5.00029-4

Trivedi BP (2012) Neuroscience: hardwired for taste. Nature 486(7403):S7–S9. https://doi.org/10.1038/486S7a

Trust TMR (2022) Time detectives: the mystery of the mary rose. Retrieved April 18, 2023, Available from: https://maryrose.org/news/time-detectives/

Velasco C, Obrist M (2020) Multisensory experiences: where the senses meet technology. Oxford University Press, Oxford

Velasco C, Tu Y, Obrist M (2018) Towards multisensory storytelling with taste and flavor. In: Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on multisensory approaches to human-food interaction. https://doi.org/10.1145/3279954.3279956

Vi CT, Ablart D, Gatti E, Velasco C, Obrist M (2017a) Not just seeing, but also feeling art: mid-air haptic experiences integrated in a multisensory art exhibition. Int J Hum Comput Stud 108:1–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2017.06.004

Vi CT, Marzo A, Ablart D, Memoli G, Subramanian S, Drinkwater B, Obrist M (2017b) TastyFloats: a contactless food delivery system. In: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM international conference on interactive surfaces and spaces. Association for Computing Machinery, Brighton, pp 161–170. https://doi.org/10.1145/3132272.3134123

Vi CT, Arthur D, Obrist M (2018) TasteBud: bring taste back into the game. In: Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on multisensory approaches to human-food interaction. Association for Computing Machinery, Boulder, p 1. https://doi.org/10.1145/3279954.3279955

Vi CT, Marzo A, Dmitrenko D, Yeomans M, Obrist M (2020a) Eating like an astronaut: how children are willing to eat. In: Companion publication of the 2020 international conference on multimodal interaction. Association for Computing Machinery, Virtual Event, pp 341–347. https://doi.org/10.1145/3395035.3425655

Vi CT, Marzo A, Memoli G, Maggioni E, Ablart D, Yeomans M, Obrist M (2020b) LeviSense: a platform for the multisensory integration in levitating food and insights into its effect on flavour perception. Int J Hum Comput Stud 139:102428. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2020.102428

Vi C, Cornelio P, Obrist M, Yeomans M (2022a) Evaluating the sense of agency for taste in moderate sweet likers. Appetite 179:106238. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2022.106238

Vi CT, Henke L, Matinez PC, Obrist M, Yeomans M (2022b) Exploring the effect of taste on sense of agency and predictions from eating behaviour. Appetite 169:105527. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2021.105527

Wang Y, Amores J, Maes P (2020) On-face olfactory interfaces. In: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376737

Wang Y, Gong H, Cui Z (2021) ScenThread: weaving smell into textiles. In: The adjunct publication of the 34th annual ACM symposium on user Interface software and technology. https://doi.org/10.1145/3474349.3480235

Wilberz A, Leschtschow D, Trepkowski C, Maiero J, Kruijff E, Riecke B (2020) FaceHaptics: robot arm based versatile facial haptics for immersive environments. In: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems. Association for Computing Machinery, pp 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376481

Wilde D, Bertran FA (2019) Participatory research through gastronomy design: a designerly move towards more playful gastronomy. Int J Food Des 4(1):3–37

Yamada T, Yokoyama S, Tanikawa T, Hirota K, Hirose M (2006) Wearable olfactory display: using odor in outdoor environment. In: IEEE virtual reality conference (VR 2006). IEEE

Yanagida Y, Noma H, Tetsutani N, Tomono A (2003) An unencumbering, localized olfactory display. In: CHI’03 extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems. Association for Computing Machinery, Ft. Lauderdale, pp 988–989. https://doi.org/10.1145/765891.766109

Yeomans MR (2006) Olfactory influences on appetite and satiety in humans. Physiol Behav 87(4):800–804. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physbeh.2006.01.029

Zhao GQ, Zhang Y, Hoon MA, Chandrashekar J, Erlenbach I, Ryba NJ, Zuker CS (2003) The receptors for mammalian sweet and umami taste. Cell 115(3):255–266. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0092-8674(03)00844-4

Download references

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship grant (Reference: MR/V025511/1); the Leverhulme Trust (Research Project Grant RPG-2018-068); and is based on funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the grant agreement No 638605 and No 737576.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

University College London, London, UK

Patricia Cornelio, Emanuela Maggioni & Marianna Obrist

Ultraleap Ltd., Bristol, UK

Patricia Cornelio & Emanuela Maggioni

Chi Thanh Vi, Giada Brianza & Emanuela Maggioni

OWidgets Ltd., London, UK

Emanuela Maggioni

International University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Chi Thanh Vi

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marianna Obrist .

Editor information

Editors and affiliations.

Universite catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

Jean Vanderdonckt

IRIT - Interactive Critical Sys Group, Paul Sabatier University, Toulouse, France

Philippe Palanque

I3S, INRIA wimmics/SPARKS team, Université Nice Sophia Antipolis, Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Marco Winckler

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2023 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this entry

Cite this entry.

Cornelio, P., Vi, C.T., Brianza, G., Maggioni, E., Obrist, M. (2023). Smell and Taste-Based Interactions Enabled Through Advances in Digital Technology. In: Vanderdonckt, J., Palanque, P., Winckler, M. (eds) Handbook of Human Computer Interaction. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27648-9_16-1

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27648-9_16-1

Received : 19 April 2023

Accepted : 18 August 2023

Published : 20 October 2023

Publisher Name : Springer, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-319-27648-9

Online ISBN : 978-3-319-27648-9

eBook Packages : Springer Reference Computer Sciences Reference Module Computer Science and Engineering

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Chapter history

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27648-9_16-2

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27648-9_16-1

• Find a journal
• Track your research

Computers Are Learning to Smell

AI could revolutionize our understanding of one of the most mysterious human senses.

Listen to this article

Listen to more stories on hark

You know the smell of warm, buttered popcorn. A crisp autumn day. The pungent, somewhat sweet scent that precedes rain. But could you begin to describe these aromas in detail? Or compare them? Your nose has some 400 olfactory receptors that do the work of translating the world’s estimated 40 billion odorous molecules into an even higher number of distinct scents your brain can understand. Yet although children are taught that grass is green and pigmented by chlorophyll, they rarely learn to describe the smell of a freshly cut lawn, let alone the ozone before a storm. The ability to express our sense of smell, in part because we’ve ignored it, eludes most of us.

Humans are not alone in this limitation. We have invented machines that can “see” and “hear”: Audio was first recorded and played back in 1877, and the first moving image followed a year later. A musical note is defined by its pitch, a single number, and computers represent a color with three numbers—the red, green, and blue (RGB) values that correspond to the types of color-receiving cells in our eyes. A song is a sequence of sounds, and an image, a map of pixels. But there has never been a machine that can flawlessly detect, store, and reproduce odors.

Read: The hidden world of scents outside your door

Scientists are working to change that. At the end of August, researchers published a paper presenting a model that can describe a molecule’s scent as well as, or even better than, a person (at least in limited trials). The computer program does so by placing molecules on a sort of odor map, where flowery smells are closer together than to, say, rotten ones. By quantitatively organizing odors, the research could mark a significant advance in enhancing our understanding of human perception. As it has already done for the study of vision and language , AI may be auguring a revolution in the study of this more enigmatic human sense.

“The last time we digitized a human sense was a generation ago,” Alex Wiltschko, a neuroscientist and a co-author of the paper, told me. “These opportunities don’t come around that often.” Computers can’t quite smell yet, but this research is a big step toward that goal, which Wiltschko began pursuing at Google Research and is now the focus of his start-up, Osmo . “People have been trying to predict smell from chemical structure for a long time,” Hiroaki Matsunami, a molecular biologist at Duke who studies olfaction and was not involved with the study, told me. “This is the best at this point in order to do that task. In that sense, it’s a great advance.”

Machine-learning algorithms require a huge amount of data to function, and the only information available for a scent comes from notoriously unreliable human noses and brains. (Even slight tweaks to a molecule can make a sweet, banana-scented compound reek of vomit; mysterious changes to your nose and brain, as many unfortunately learned from developing COVID-19 , can make coffee smell of sewage.) Wiltschko and his team set out to identify and curate a set of roughly 5,000 molecules and associated odor descriptions (“alcoholic,” “fishy,” “smoky,” and so on) from researchers in the flavor and fragrance industries, then fed that data to a type of algorithm called a graph neural network , which was able to represent each molecule’s atoms and chemical bonds in a sort of internal diagram. The resulting program can, given a molecule’s structure, predict how it will smell as a combination of the existing odor labels.

Testing those predictions’ accuracy presented a whole other challenge. The team had to train a new, independent group of people to smell and label a new set of molecules that the program had never analyzed. “People are really bad at [describing scents] when they walk off the street,” Joel Mainland, a neuroscientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, in Philadelphia, who helped conduct the training for the study, told me. “If you train them for a couple hours, they get pretty good, pretty fast.”

Over five one-hour sessions, participants were given different substances associated with one of 55 different odors, such as kombucha (“fermented”), a crayon (“waxy”), or a green-apple Jolly Rancher (“apple”), to learn a reference point for each label. Participants then took a test in which they had to describe the smell of 20 common molecules (vanillin is vanilla-scented; carvone is minty), and then retook the test to make sure their judgments were consistent, Emily Mayhew, a food scientist at Michigan State University and co-author of the study, told me. Everybody who passed could help validate the algorithm.

The researchers curated a set of molecules that was highly distinct from the set used to train the program, then had participants smell and describe all of the new molecules with various labels, each rated from zero to five (hypothetically, a lemon might receive a five for “citrus,” a two for “fruity,” and a zero for “smoky.”). The average of all those ratings became the benchmark against which to compare the computer. “If you take two people and you ask them to describe a smell, they will often disagree,” Mainland said. But an average of several smell-trained people is “pretty stable.”

Overall, the AI model “smelled” a bit more accurately than the people participating in the research. The program provides “a really powerful demonstration that some key aspects of our odor perception are shared,” Sandeep Robert Datta, a neurobiologist at Harvard who did not conduct the research but is an informal adviser to Osmo, told me. Exactly what two people think a lemon smells like varies, but most will agree a lemon and an orange both smell of citrus, and an apple does not.

Read: The difference between speaking and thinking

Then there’s the study’s map. Every molecule, and in turn its odor, can be numerically represented in a mathematical space that the authors call a “principal odor map.” It provides insight into not just the relation between structure and smell but also the way our brain organizes odors, Wiltschko told me: Floral scents are in one section of the map, meaty ones in another; lavender is closer to jasmine on the map than it is to a beefy aroma.

Datta cautioned that he would not describe the odor map as principal so much as perceptual . “It does a beautiful job of capturing the relationship between chemistry and perception,” he said. But it doesn’t take into account all the steps—from receptors in our nose to the cerebral cortex in our brain—that occur as a molecule is turned into chemical signals that are then transformed into verbal descriptions of a smell. And the map isn’t like RGB values in that it doesn’t describe basic components that can make any smell—although it does “suggest to us that RGB [for smell] is possible.” The computer model’s perceptual odor map is an “extraordinarily important proof of concept,” he added, and provides crucial insights into how the brain appears to organize smells. For instance, you might assume certain categories of smell—citrus and smoky, for instance—are entirely separate, Datta said. But the odor map suggests that paths connect even these disparate scents.

The model is just the first in many advances needed to digitize scent. “It still lacks some of the important aspects of smell,” Matsunami told me, which the paper’s authors readily admit. Their program cannot predict how molecules smell in combination, and most natural odors are the results of very complex mixtures. It also wasn’t designed to take into account odor concentration, which can change not just the degree but also the quality of a smell (the molecule MMB, for instance, gives off a pleasant odor in small doses and is added to household cleaners , but in high concentrations it helps make cat urine smell like cat urine .) That the model also predicts a smell only on average makes it unclear how well the program would do in real-world settings, given people’s individual perceptions, Datta said. Even though the research is like the “Manhattan Project for categorizing odor qualities relative to physical, chemical parameters,” Richard Doty, the director of the Smell and Taste Center at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved with the study, told me, it’s unclear to him how much further the model can bring our understanding of smell given how complex our nose is. “I don’t know where it leads us.”

Still, future research could tackle some of these problems, Wiltschko argues, and fine-tune the map itself. The number of dimensions in the map, for instance, is arbitrarily set to optimize the computer program; changes in the training data might improve the model as well. And studying other parts of our olfactory system, such as receptors in our nose or neural pathways to the brain, will likely also help reveal more about how and through what stages the human body processes various smells. One day, a set of programs that can translate the structure, concentration, and mixture of molecules into a smell, paired with a chemical sensor, could truly realize digital olfaction.

Even without proper Smell-o-Vision , it is shocking, in a sense, that a computer model removed from the facts of human embodiment—a program has no nose, olfactory bulb, or brain—can reliably predict how something smells. “The paper implicitly advances the argument that you don’t need to understand the brain in order to understand smell perception,” Datta said. The research reflects a new, AI-inflected scientific understanding that seems to be popping up everywhere—using chatbots to study the human brain’s language network, or using deep-learning algorithms to fold proteins. It is an understanding rooted not in observation of the world so much as that of data: prediction without intuition.

• Data, AI, & Machine Learning
• Managing Technology
• Social Responsibility
• Workplace, Teams, & Culture
• AI & Machine Learning
• Diversity & Inclusion
• Big ideas Research Projects
• Artificial Intelligence and Business Strategy
• Responsible AI
• Future of the Workforce
• Future of Leadership
• All Research Projects
• AI in Action
• Most Popular
• The Truth Behind the Nursing Crisis
• Work/23: The Big Shift
• Coaching for the Future-Forward Leader
• Measuring Culture

The spring 2024 issue’s special report looks at how to take advantage of market opportunities in the digital space, and provides advice on building culture and friendships at work; maximizing the benefits of LLMs, corporate venture capital initiatives, and innovation contests; and scaling automation and digital health platform.

• Past Issues
• Upcoming Events
• Video Archive
• Me, Myself, and AI
• Three Big Points

Business Scents: The Rise of Digital Olfaction

Two emerging branches of digital olfaction technology have the potential to revolutionize a range of industries.

• Data, AI, & Machine Learning
• AI & Machine Learning

The aroma of freshly baked bread wafting through supermarket aisles. The percolating pot of coffee in a house for sale. The leathery richness of a new car’s interior. We may not always realize it, but our sense of smell is central to many decisions we make as consumers, be it purchasing a new car or deciding to grab a doughnut and coffee on the run. According to the Scent Marketing Institute , leather and cedar aromas will induce you to buy furniture, and floral and citrus notes will make you linger longer in the bookshop. One study showed that adding ambient scents to a Nike showroom increased consumers’ pleasure and stimulation, willingness to spend more money, and likelihood of returning to the store, compared with a nonscented environment.

Put simply, smell sells — a fact that has long been understood by retailers, manufacturers, and advertisers. But despite the economic and commercial importance of olfaction, businesses have generally lacked robust tools to detect, measure, and manage smells in a scientific way. This is now changing with the emergence of two branches of digital olfaction technology: one focused on the digital detection and analysis of different odors, and the other on the digital transmission and re-creation of smells. These technologies could potentially revolutionize a range of industries, from fragrances and food to the environmental and health care sectors.

Get Updates on Innovative Strategy

The latest insights on strategy and execution in the workplace, delivered to your inbox once a month.

Please enter a valid email address

Thank you for signing up

Privacy Policy

A variety of innovative startups are pioneering new approaches to digital olfaction. The technology draws on a raft of scientific disciplines, including organic chemistry, silicon engineering, machine learning, data science, photonics, and software engineering. Aryballe, a digital olfaction startup based in France, uses tiny proteins called peptides grafted onto silicon wafers that react to the gas molecules associated with different odors. The various digital signatures are then decoded using machine learning and expressed in the terms that humans use to describe smells: woody, floral, fragrant, smoky, and so on. Aromyx, a digital olfaction company based in California, uses the same receptors that are found in the human nose and tongue to identify different odors. CEO Josh Silverman told us: “Rather than trying to mimic the human sense of smell — a very hard problem — we clone the actual genes from humans. We then develop these in the lab and test how different genes respond to different stimuli, such as coffee and juice.”

Applications of Digital Olfactory Detection

In addition to enhancing products’ appeal to consumers, emerging olfactory technologies support a variety of use cases for improved product quality, as well as human health and safety, in areas as diverse as food, auto maintenance, health care, and the environment.

Faster and cheaper quality control. Digital olfaction is starting to transform quality control, traditionally a labor-intensive and somewhat subjective activity for many industries. Take the example of the global fragrance industry, estimated to be worth around $71 billion , which encompasses perfumes as well as deodorants, personal care products, and household care products such as air fresheners and scented candles. Traditionally, teams of highly trained human testers have assessed the quality of different product batches, but the process is time-consuming and ultimately subjective. Here, companies such as Aryballe are using digital olfaction to test different fragrances against a “gold standard” for the particular scent. As Sam Guilaume, CEO of Aryballe, explained: “A fragrance will usually change as it’s exposed to the air or to different conditions. With digital olfaction, we can track how the perfume changes over time as it’s exposed to different kinds of skin types, sweat, air conditions, and so on. Once we know what works, we can also potentially create completely new fragrances that have the desired qualities.”

Food quality control could also benefit greatly. Digital olfaction can be used to identify minute variations in the quality of food products and detect pathogens that could endanger human health or lead to food spoilage during supply chain transport. Olfactory technologies are already being used to screen for salmonella in packaged meat products. Digital olfaction can also greatly aid the search for better and healthier foods. As Silverman explains, “Many manufacturers want to make a healthier beverage — less sugar, alcohol, calories — but they want to do that in a way that doesn’t turn consumers off and doesn’t cost more. Digital olfaction can help with this kind of problem.”

Enabling the smart home. Some of the most practical applications of digital olfaction detection are in the home . A truly smart fridge, for example, could tell you when the milk is about to turn sour or when that loin of beef has aged to perfection. Olfactory sensors in an oven could roast food to your specifications or prevent it from being overcooked. Google Nest Protect uses sensors to distinguish between different kinds of smoke to avoid irritating false alarms while you make toast or take a steamy shower.

Calibrating regional tastes. Many retailers and manufacturers recognize scent as an important factor influencing the consumer appeal of a product, but the consumer-scent relationship varies greatly by region and country, making it difficult to calibrate and measure. Take the automotive industry, for example. Car showrooms have long known that the new-car smell influences our decision to purchase, but there are strong regional differences: While the intoxicating aromas of leather, resins, and plastics tend to captivate European and American car buyers, it is a distinct turnoff in Asia, where consumers prefer a more neutral odor. Digital olfaction can help optimize the new-car aroma for different markets. Consider, too, how perfume preferences vary by country . In Japan, for example, strong scents are generally frowned upon, whereas in other countries, there is a preference for distinctive, musky signatures. Digital olfaction can help calibrate these olfactory notes to different regional and local preferences.

Predictive maintenance. The phrase “something doesn’t smell right” usually signifies a gut feeling that there’s a problem. In fact, digital olfaction can be used in a range of industries to detect problems before they become apparent, improving safety and reducing the risk of costly unscheduled repairs. The technology is already being deployed in the car-sharing industry, where olfactory sensors in vehicles can detect burnt fuses or wiring before they become apparent to a human driver. They can also pick up on food spills or cigarette smoke left behind by car sharers that would otherwise be difficult to detect. In industrial sectors, olfactory technologies can alert people to the presence or buildup of dangerous gases in chemical plants or processing centers and detect emerging leaks in oil or gas pipelines.

Early diagnosis and prevention in health care. We humans have long believed that our olfactory senses provide important clues to our well-being, both physical and mental. Ancient physicians used to smell a sick person’s breath to identify their illness. More recently, research has established that canines can detect the early presence of diseases such as lung cancer via breath and urine. Electronic noses have been shown to be around 96% accurate in detecting lung cancer in patients. Recent research has suggested that digital olfaction could provide a quick and safe test for the detection of COVID-19 .

These developments open up the tantalizing prospect of low-cost, noninvasive technology to screen for a wide range of diseases and viruses, particularly those that are hard to detect with conventional early-stage screening. In the future, you could potentially breathe into your smartphone to get an instant health check or wear a mask that automatically lights up when coming into contact with the coronavirus.

Reducing environmental impacts. Companies and government agencies spend billions of dollars every year to control or eliminate noxious odors in the environment. Digital olfaction makes it possible to detect, monitor, and reduce such emissions at lower cost. Bio-electronic noses can identify harmful pollutants in factories or urban areas, assess water quality, measure soil contamination, and check for chemicals or hazardous materials in warehouses and harbors.

Digital olfaction can also increase the effectiveness of recycling initiatives, a key plank of the move toward a circular economy. According to Aromyx’s Silverman, “Being able to recycle plastics makes a huge difference to the environment, but often these plastics contain contaminants and off smells from their original use. We can use digital olfaction to isolate these off smells and ultimately remove them.”

Digital Transmission of Scents

In a nascent area of olfactory research, scents are digitally transmitted via computer code that can be sent online or via smartphone app and reproduced at a kiosk or through a scent-emitting device. Previous attempts to re-create scents have faced challenges because liquid or gaseous odorants often contaminate each other. The Aroma Shooter, developed by Japanese startup Aromajoin, gets around this problem through the use of solid-state materials that can deliver split-second volleys of over 400 different scents. The technology is now being used to create “aroma signage” in major department stores and to improve virtual-reality applications. Another Japanese startup has developed the Scentee Machina, a device that connects to a smartphone app that can diffuse different fragrances according to the user’s mood and the time of day. Researchers at All These Worlds, a VR company based in California, have developed a wireless-enabled scent collar that releases targeted scents for virtual reality simulations.

One frontier area of application is the use of digital scents in mental health treatment. Research has shown that our moods are greatly affected by different odors: Lavender can reduce labor pangs in childbirth and promote sleep ; peppermint can improve physical performance; and orange may help calm our nerves. One study showed how low-cost nasal clips containing lavender odorants could improve the quality of sleep for people with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Digital olfaction also opens up the possibility of bringing the past to life through the re-creation of long-lost smells — the spices and incense of the Roman Forum in early medieval times, for example, or the soot and smoke of Dickensian London. Researchers at the UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage in London are re-creating and preserving “historical” scents that could otherwise be lost, such as the dusty smell of old books. An organization called Sensory Maps is creating olfactory maps of cities, both current and historical, that can then be virtualized using digital design, animation, and scent diffusion. Such maps can help us understand changing patterns of social and economic activity within cities and contribute to better urban planning and design.

Digital olfaction also opens up the possibility of completely new smells and products algorithmically optimized to personal tastes and different settings. Combined with other technologies such as VR and haptics, digital olfaction could radically transform the entertainment industry, bringing us closer to a true multisensory experience in the realms of fashion, retailing, leisure, and tourism. Imagine taking in the aroma of products while shopping online, or imbibing the sea air on a virtual reality tour of the Maldives. Imagine a transformed book-reading experience (and transformed publishing industry) as virtual reality and digital olfaction complement classic books: the vinegary tang of fish and chips in Brighton Rock , the sweet rose aroma of Turkish delight in The Chronicles of Narnia, or the whitewashing paint in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer .

Capturing the Potential of Digital Olfaction

How can companies better capitalize on the promise of digital olfaction and avoid the potential pitfalls? We suggest four actions that can help guide businesses:

Understand your olfactory value chain. Companies can start by mapping their olfactory value chain to identify the role that olfaction plays across the different areas of their business. A fast-moving consumer goods company, for example, could have thousands of product lines ranging from food to household detergents; scents are an intrinsic part of these products’ appeal to customers but remain largely unquantified. In some industries — such as wine or fragrance production — digital olfaction can complement the tacit knowledge of experienced tasters or product formulators. Olfactory mapping can trace how a product’s olfactory features vary across the supply chain, over time, and across different locations — from farm to fork in food products, for example. Such profiling can improve product development strategies and supply chain optimization and ultimately garner a stronger competitive advantage through distinctive customer appeal.

Prepare for contestable markets. As digital olfaction begins to decode the volatile organic compounds that contribute to our sense of smell, it introduces the possibility of reverse-engineering many well-known or distinctive aromas. Just as digital technologies are lowering entry barriers in many markets and making them “contestable” with new products, we may see something similar with digital olfaction. Copycat versions of products with distinctive or hard-to-replicate aromas — perfumes, fine wines, furniture, cheeses, teas and coffee, and even fast foods — could proliferate. Companies will need to expend effort to preserve the intangible capital of their olfactory signatures.

Consider multiple senses. In real life, our experiences are formed from a range of senses. Digital olfaction will be most powerful when combined with other sensory technologies such as virtual and augmented reality, haptics, holograms, and emotional AI systems. Sensors and machine learning algorithms will be critical in capturing, decoding, and translating olfactory signals to human experiences. As Silverman explained: “Using just over 400 working olfactory receptors, you can differentiate over a trillion different odors. This implies that there is a high-dimensional space that the human brain is generating with these receptors. We need machine learning to disentangle these spaces, and then we need natural language processing to translate those combinations into terms humans understand — nutty or toasted, for example. Ultimately, our aim is to create a kind of Rosetta stone for the sense of smell.”

Anticipate ethical and regulatory hurdles. Despite the promise of olfactory technology, there are technical, ethical, and regulatory challenges to surmount. A particular concern is the potential for addiction as ever more powerful olfactory triggers are developed; at the other extreme, overexposure could lead to the desensitization of people exposed to powerful scents on a daily basis, just as loud music has caused hearing loss for some in the entertainment or hospitality industries. Early engagement with regulators and health authorities will be critical, both to mitigate the risks and promulgate the health-enhancing effects of digital olfaction.

Related Articles

Smell is our most primordial sense, used by our ancestors to forage for food, sense danger, and detect illnesses. Yet it remains the most complex and least well understood of all the senses — the human olfactory receptors were only identified in 1991, earning a Nobel Prize for the scientists who made the discovery. With advances in digital olfaction, we now have the ability to decode and harness the sense of smell in ways never thought possible.

For businesses, digital olfaction opens up many opportunities: new products, services, and consumer experiences; faster and more accurate production processes; low-cost environmental and health care solutions; and new ways to reach and engage consumers. There will be challenges, too: regulation, responsible use, and new competitors and business models. Now is the time to consider how digital olfaction can help your business capture the sweet smell of success.

About the Authors

Mark Purdy ( @mjpurdyecon ) is managing director of Purdy & Associates, an independent economics and technology research company. Max Klymenko ( @maxoklymenko ) is the creative director of Klym&Co., a social impact communications agency. Mia Purdy ( @miaapurdy ) is a law and technology researcher.

More Like This

Add a comment cancel reply.

You must sign in to post a comment. First time here? Sign up for a free account : Comment on articles and get access to many more articles.

Comments (2)

Ann hendricks, chirayath sreemohan.

Hey there, human — the robots need you! Vote for IEEE’s Robots Guide in the Webby Awards.

For IEEE Members

Ieee spectrum, follow ieee spectrum, support ieee spectrum, enjoy more free content and benefits by creating an account, saving articles to read later requires an ieee spectrum account, the institute content is only available for members, downloading full pdf issues is exclusive for ieee members, downloading this e-book is exclusive for ieee members, access to spectrum 's digital edition is exclusive for ieee members, following topics is a feature exclusive for ieee members, adding your response to an article requires an ieee spectrum account, create an account to access more content and features on ieee spectrum , including the ability to save articles to read later, download spectrum collections, and participate in conversations with readers and editors. for more exclusive content and features, consider joining ieee ., join the world’s largest professional organization devoted to engineering and applied sciences and get access to all of spectrum’s articles, archives, pdf downloads, and other benefits. learn more →, join the world’s largest professional organization devoted to engineering and applied sciences and get access to this e-book plus all of ieee spectrum’s articles, archives, pdf downloads, and other benefits. learn more →, access thousands of articles — completely free, create an account and get exclusive content and features: save articles, download collections, and talk to tech insiders — all free for full access and benefits, join ieee as a paying member., these researchers want to send smells over the internet, electrical stimulation of cells in the nasal passages produces sweet fragrances and chemical odors.

Imagine a virtual reality movie about the Civil War where you can smell the smoke from the soldiers’ rifles. Or an online dating site where the profiles are scented with perfume or cologne. Or an augmented reality app that lets you point your phone at a restaurant menu and sample the aroma of each dish.

The researchers who are working on “digital smell” are still a very long way from such applications—in part because their technology’s form factor leaves something to be desired. Right now, catching a whiff of the future means sticking a cable up your nose, so electrodes can make contact with neurons deep in the nasal passages. But they’ve got some ideas for improvements. 

This digital smell research is led by  Kasun Karunanayaka , a senior research fellow at the Imagineering Institute in Malaysia. He started the project as a Ph.D. student with Adrian Cheok , now director of the institute and a professor at the City University of London, who’s on a quest to create a “multisensory Internet.” In one of Cheok’s earliest projects he sent hugs to chickens , and his students have also worked with digital kisses and electric taste .

Karunanayaka says most prior experiments with digital smell have involved chemical cartridges in devices that attach to computers or phones; sending a command to the device triggers the release of substances, which mix together to produce an odor.

Working in that chemical realm, Karunanayaka’s team is collaborating with a Japanese startup called Scentee that he says is developing “the world’s first smartphone gadget that can produce smell sensations.” They’re working together on a Scentee app that integrates with other apps to add smells to various smartphone functions. For example, the app could link to your morning alarm to get the day started with the smell of coffee, or could add fragrances to texts so that messages from different friends come with distinct aromas.

But Karunanayaka’s team wanted to find an alternative to chemical devices with cartridges that require refilling. They wanted to send smells with electricity alone. 

For his experiments, he convinced 31 volunteers to let him stick a thin and flexible cable up their noses. The cable was tipped with both a tiny camera and silver electrodes at its tip. The camera helped researchers navigate the nasal passages, enabling them to bring the electrodes into contact with olfactory epithelium cells that lie about 7 centimeters above and behind the nostrils. These cells send information up the olfactory nerve to the brain.

Typically, these olfactory cells are stimulated by chemical compounds that bind to cell receptors. Instead, Karunanayaka’s team zapped them with an electric current.

The researchers had previously combed the scientific literature [PDF] for examples of electrical stimulation of nasal cells, and found some reports that the stimulation caused test subjects to perceive odors. So they decided to experiment with different parameters of stimulation, altering both the amount and frequency of the current, until they found the settings that most reliably produced smell sensations.

The subjects most often perceived odors they described as fragrant or chemical. Some people also reported smells that they described as fruity, sweet, toasted minty, or woody. 

This experiment was a very basic proof-of-concept, Karunanayaka says. The next step is to determine whether certain stimulation parameters are reliably linked to certain smells. He must also investigate how much variability there is between subjects. “There may be differences due to age, gender, and human anatomy,” he says. 

The biggest question, however, is whether he can find a way to produce these ghostly aromas without sticking a tube up people’s noses. The experiments were very uncomfortable for most of the volunteers, Karunanayaka admits: “A lot of people wanted to participate, but after one trial they left, because they couldn’t bear it.”

Two possible solutions suggest themselves, Karunanayaka says: They could make the insert smaller, more flexible, and less unbearable. Or they could skip past the nose’s olfactory cells and directly stimulate the brain.  

As a step toward that neurotech goal, the Imagineering Institute researchers are planning a brain-scanning collaboration with Thomas Hummel , a leading expert in smell disorders at the Technische Universität Dresden in Germany. In the planned experiment, volunteers will both smell real odiferous objects, such as a rose, and also receive nasal stimulation. All these sniffs will take place while the volunteers are getting their brains scanned by a noninvasive method such as fMRI . 

“We’ll see which areas in the brain are activated in each condition, and then compare the two patterns of activity,” Karunanayaka says. “Are they activating the same areas of the brain?” If so, that brain region could become the target for future research. Maybe the researchers could use a headset that provides a noninvasive form of stimulation to trigger that brain region, thus producing smell sensations without the need for either a rose or a nose-cable.

Such tech could serve a restorative purpose: People with smell disorders could theoretically wear some headgear to regain some smell functions. And for people with intact sniffer systems, it could provide enhancements: For example, VR headset makers could build in the brain-stimulating tech to provide users with a more immersive and richer sensory experience. 

• With This Bionic Nose, COVID Survivors May Smell the Roses Again - IEEE Spectrum ›
• The Oh-So-Aromatic History of the Smell-O-Vision - IEEE Spectrum ›
• This Neural Net Maps Molecules to Aromas - IEEE Spectrum ›

Eliza Strickland is a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum , where she covers AI, biomedical engineering, and other topics. She holds a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University.

This Blood-Sampling Cytometer Is Small Enough for Mars

Tiny sensor aims to monitor tumors in real time, 50 by 20: wireless ev charging hits key benchmark, related stories, pressure-relief eye tech advances toward approval, prototype sensors sniff out seizures before they occur, no more invasive surgery—this pacemaker dissolves instead.

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

• View all journals
• Explore content
• About the journal
• Publish with us
• Sign up for alerts
• 22 June 2022

Restoring smell with an electronic nose

• Simon Makin 0

Simon Makin is a freelance writer in Reading, UK.

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Image: Sam Falconer

One of the many aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic that has taken the world by surprise is the vast swathes of people who lost their sense of smell. For most people who get COVID-19, the loss of smell is brief, but some do not regain their sense of smell for 6 months or longer 1 . “There’s going to be a whole cohort of individuals who aren’t going to recover, looking for some help,” says Richard Costanzo, a physiologist at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in Richmond.

Access options

Access Nature and 54 other Nature Portfolio journals

Get Nature+, our best-value online-access subscription

24,99 € / 30 days

cancel any time

Subscribe to this journal

Receive 51 print issues and online access

185,98 € per year

only 3,65 € per issue

Rent or buy this article

Prices vary by article type

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Nature 606 , S12-S13 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-01630-1

This article is part of Nature Outlook: Smell , an editorially independent supplement produced with the financial support of third parties. About this content .

Lechien, J. R. et al. J. Intern. Med. 290 , 451–461 (2021).

Article   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Hummel, T. et al. Rhinology 54 , 1–30 (2017).

Costanzo, R. M. & Coelho, D. Olfactory implant system US patent 9,517,342 B2 (2016).

Boisvert, I., Reis, M., Au, A., Cowan, R. & Dowell, R. C. PLoS ONE 15 , e0232421 (2020).

Coelho, D. H. & Costanzo, R. M. Otolaryngol. Head Neck Surg. 155 , 526–532 (2016).

Coelho, D. H., Socolovsky, L. D. & Costanzo, R. M. Int. Forum Allergy Rhinol . 8 , 922–927 (2018).

Article   Google Scholar  

Holbrook, E. H., Puram, S. V., See, R. B., Tripp, A. G. & Nair, D. G. Int. Forum Allergy Rhinol. 9 , 158–164 (2018).

Besser, G., Liu, D. T., Renner, B., Hummel, T. & Mueller, C. A. Laryngoscope 129 , 312–316 (2019).

Benkhatar, H., Loubieres, C., Kada, A. R., De Malherbe, M. & Meunier, N. Rhinology 60 , 145–147 (2022).

PubMed   Google Scholar  

Download references

Related Articles

Sponsor feature: From molecules to perception: 126 years at the forefront of olfactory science

• Sensory systems
• Neuroscience

Bitter taste receptors are even older than scientists thought

Research Highlight 11 APR 24

How a light touch registers on the skin

Research Highlight 08 MAR 24

Coffee in stereo: your brain records an odour’s spatial information

News 03 NOV 23

This water bottle purifies your drink with energy from your steps

Research Highlight 17 APR 24

A milestone map of mouse-brain connectivity reveals challenging new terrain for scientists

Technology Feature 15 APR 24

How to break big tech’s stranglehold on AI in academia

Correspondence 09 APR 24

Coupled neural activity controls working memory in humans

News & Views 17 APR 24

This fMRI technique promised to transform brain research — why can no one replicate it?

News 11 APR 24

Associate or Senior Editor, Nature Biomedical Engineering

Associate Editor or Senior Editor, Nature Biomedical Engineering Location: London, Shanghai and Madrid — Hybrid office and remote working Deadline:...

London (Central), London (Greater) (GB)

Springer Nature Ltd

FACULTY POSITION IN PATHOLOGY RESEARCH

Dallas, Texas (US)

The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (UT Southwestern Medical Center)

Postdoc Fellow / Senior Scientist

The Yakoub and Sulzer labs at Harvard Medical School-Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Columbia University

Boston, Massachusetts (US)

Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital

Postdoc in Computational Genomics – Machine Learning for Multi-Omics Profiling of Cancer Evolution

Computational Postdoc - Artificial Intelligence in Oncology and Regulatory Genomics and Cancer Evolution at the DKFZ - limited to 2 years

Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg (DE)

German Cancer Research Center in the Helmholtz Association (DKFZ)

Computational Postdoc

The German Cancer Research Center is the largest biomedical research institution in Germany.

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Quick links

• Explore articles by subject
• Guide to authors
• Editorial policies

Integration of smell into the digital world

Ieee account.

• Change Username/Password
• Update Address

Purchase Details

• Payment Options
• Order History
• View Purchased Documents

Profile Information

• Communications Preferences
• Profession and Education
• Technical Interests
• US & Canada: +1 800 678 4333
• Worldwide: +1 732 981 0060
• Contact & Support
• About IEEE Xplore
• Accessibility
• Terms of Use
• Nondiscrimination Policy
• Privacy & Opting Out of Cookies

A not-for-profit organization, IEEE is the world's largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. © Copyright 2024 IEEE - All rights reserved. Use of this web site signifies your agreement to the terms and conditions.

'Digital smell' technology could let us transmit odors in online chats

Having a video chat with a friend or colleague is all about seeing and hearing — at least for now. But experiments conducted recently in Malaysia suggest it may be possible to develop “electric smell” technology capable of conveying odors as well as sights and sounds.

The research is preliminary and not without its critics. But if electric smell pans out, long-distance conversations could one day be far more immersive — enabling you to share with a loved one the aroma of a meal you just prepared, for example, or letting you catch a whiff of the sea from your sister’s beach vacation.

“It’s not just about the smell,” said Adrian Cheok, one of the scientists behind the experiments. “It is part of a whole, integrated virtual reality or augmented reality . So, for example, you could have a virtual dinner with your friend through the internet. You can see them in 3D and also share a glass of wine together.”

Evoking virtual odors

In real life, odors are transmitted when airborne molecules waft into the nose , prompting specialized nerve cells in the upper airway to fire off impulses to the brain. In the recent experiments, performed on 31 test subjects at the Imagineering Institute in the Malaysian city of Nusajaya, researchers used electrodes in the nostrils to deliver weak electrical currents above and behind the nostrils, where these neurons are found.

The researchers were able to evoke 10 different virtual odors, including fruity, woody and minty.

The scientists couldn’t control which odors the subjects experienced, and they’re under no illusion that people will want to stick wires up their nostrils each time they have a video chat.

But Cheok, who is also the institute’s director as well as a professor at the City University of London, foresees a day when odors might be sensed by a sort of electronic nose (similar devices are now used in food-processing plants), sent in digital form over the internet and delivered to the recipient not via wires in the nose but via electrode-studded glasses or goggles.

“This stage was more exploratory,” Cheok said of the research. “The next stage is to produce it in a more controlled manner, and this will allow for people to develop software and products to generate electric smell.”

Science 'Westworld' science adviser shares his vision of robots and the future of AI

Cheok said it might take decades before the sorts of devices he envisions are ready to use. But he thinks devices that convey pre-programmed odors for entertainment applications — for example, to give moviegoers the generic scent of burnt rubber as they watch a car chase in an action movie — might be available sooner, perhaps within 15 years.

Electric smell technology could find applications beyond entertainment and personal communications. If it does prove feasible, it might be used to restore a sense of smell in people who have lost it as a result of illness, injury or inborn abnormality, said Joel Mainland, an olfactory neuroscientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia.

“I think there are medical implications for a certain class of people who have lost their sense of smell , but not everybody,” Mainland said.

A flawed study?

Mainland added that it should be at least theoretically possible to evoke specific odors via electrical stimulation. He compared this approach to cochlear implants , which electrically stimulate the nerve that carries sound signals to the brain to restore limited hearing to deaf people. “It’s not a natural stimulation," he said of cochlear implants. "It seems like it shouldn’t work."

It’s possible a smell-restoring device could function in a similar manner, he said. “If you start playing something that is correlated to smells that are coming in, people’s brains will be able to decode what is going on.”

But Mainland is critical of the Malaysian study, saying it’s possible that the smells the subjects reported may not have been produced by electricity. “I can give you an empty jar to sniff when you don't have anything up your nose, and sometimes you would report a faint odor,” he said in an email. “If you are asking someone if something smells, they have a strong bias to say yes even where there is no odor.”

The study failed to account for this possibility, he said.

Science Why scientists are teaching AI to think like a dog

Charles Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Oxford in England, agreed — and criticized the idea of electrical smell generally. He said the sense of smell is too complex and poorly understood for anyone to know how to stimulate it artificially.

“Any everyday smell will probably activate tens or hundreds of receptors,” he said in an email. “If you have only got one electrode in the nose, no matter what frequency rate or intensity (of electrical current you use) you are not going to be able to stimulate enough receptors to deliver a (perception).”

Adding to doubts is the long history of often poorly received attempts to add smell to movies, video games and even smartphones.

In 1959, movie theaters tried out and quickly abandoned AromaRama, a system that piped scents in through ceiling vents; in 1960, a similar system called Smell-O-Vision failed to catch on. In 2010, Time magazine named Smell-O-Vision one of the 50 worst inventions of all time .

More recently, a small coffee-mug-size device billed as a digital scent speaker was created to release scents on command from a smartphone app. But one reviewer called the device, Cyrano, a “ glorified high-tech equivalent of an air freshener or candle .”

Likewise, the Feelreal mask, designed to release odor molecules from cartridges into the nose during virtual reality games, was panned as “ an instrument of torture .”

But Cheok thinks these systems and devices share a key limitation: They rely on odor molecules, which hang around long after they are needed, resulting in muddled or unwanted odors.

“Let’s say you are watching a movie and then you see a scene of [a] car chase and you have the smell of smoke," he said. "The problem is when you cut to the next scene, you don’t want to smell smoke anymore. If we can electrify the smells, in technical terms, we can reduce the time constant, we can reduce the time to stop the smell and change to a different smell.”

What about previous research on stimulating electrical stimulation of odors? A study conducted in France in 1973 successfully elicited scents including vanilla, almonds and a burnt odor. But subsequent efforts to corroborate those findings, including one by Israeli researchers in 2016, failed.

One of Cheok’s collaborators on the experiments, Kasun Karunanayaka, a senior research fellow at the Imagineering Institute, said in an email that he was aware of the limitations of the new research.

“Hopefully, we can improve the results further,” he said. Future research, to be undertaken with a smell disorder specialist at Germany’s Technische Universität Dresden, will continue to test electrical stimulation of odors and use brain scans to compare how study subjects respond to actual and electrically stimulated odors.

WANT MORE STORIES ABOUT TECHNOLOGY?

• Nissan's 'B2V' system lets you drive a car with brain waves
• Deep Fakes: How they are made and how they can be detected
• This new supercomputer is now the world's fastest brain-mimicking machine

FOLLOW NBC NEWS MACH ON TWITTER , FACEBOOK , AND INSTAGRAM .

What Is Digital Scent Technology and How Does It Work?

Would DST bring the smell of your favorite games to life? Or make every shopping more immersive?

The onward march of technology has never been more prevalent as we move into the age of AI. But while tools like ChatGPT and Bing Chat may be causing waves, another innovative technology stands out for sheer novelty and potential—digital scent technology (DST).

DST aims to introduce the sense of smell into our digital lives. In computing terms, this is the forgotten sense. But a fledgling technology is promising to change that.

Let's take a look at DST and see if it comes up smelling of roses or if the whole technology smells a bit fishy.

How Does Digital Scent Technology Work?

It is worth reiterating that this is an emerging technology, and you are unlikely to see it in your local computer shop soon. However, the foundational principles and mechanisms behind DST are already in place, and ongoing research is refining the technology.

The process is complex, but it can be broken down into three basic steps:

• Scent Creation : This is the initial stage where a specific scent is identified and created. It involves using various chemical compounds to mimic the desired natural odors.
• Scent Digitization : Once the scent is created, it is digitized. This involves creating a unique digital signature for each scent, a specific combination of data representing the unique smell.
• Scent Reproduction : The final stage is the reproduction of the scent. This is where the digital signature is decoded, and the scent is recreated using a device known as a "scent synthesizer." These devices use a mixture of chemicals to reproduce the scent based on its digital signature.

One way to think about a scent synthesizer is to compare it to a printer. A printer uses different colored ink cartridges to create all the necessary hues in a desired print. A smell synthesizer works similarly, blending the "odor chemicals" from scent cartridges to recreate the desired odor.

Applications of Digital Scent Technology

History is littered with technologies that floundered through a lack of useful applications or interest. Ultimately, it is the usefulness of a technology that will define its fate. On paper, the list of applications for DST is long enough (and useful enough) to ensure it survives a concept called the technology adoption curve (TAC).

Among the potential applications of DST are:

• Virtual Reality Enhancement : Virtual reality is already changing entertainment , but DST can make virtual environments more immersive by adding the dimension of smell. The acrid smell of gunsmoke in a battlefield simulation or the smell of oil and rubber in a racing game could greatly enhance the VR gaming experience.
• E-commerce : Online shoppers could smell products like perfumes or candles before buying, adding a new layer to the shopping experience.
• Therapeutic Uses : By creating specific scents, DST could help treat conditions like anxiety and depression, enhancing the effectiveness of therapeutic practices.
• Culinary Experiences : Imagine smelling a dish before trying out a recipe or ordering food online. DST could revolutionize the way we experience food digitally.
• Environmental Simulation : DST could be used in simulations to train individuals for jobs in specific environments, like firefighters or perfumers, by recreating the scents associated with those environments.
• Ambiance : Like the scent dispensers in restrooms, synthesizers could be programmed to release your favorite scent into the air to add a personalized touch to your living or working space.

The potential applications of DST give the technology a fighting chance of surviving the TAC. It already has diverse uses, and the list will undoubtedly grow as the technology improves and becomes more mainstream.

The Future of DST

The smell of innovation is in the air, which could mean that DST is the next big thing in technology.

This technology is still in its infancy but has huge potential. There are plenty of hurdles to overcome technically. There are also ethical considerations, including many of the same ethical concerns surrounding AI . Additionally, there are likely to be copyright issues. For instance, can you recreate the scent of your favorite perfume without infringing copyright?

But the drive is there, and there are enough genuine potential uses to see it overcome these hurdles.

Looking ahead, improvements in accuracy and the development of smaller, cheaper, and more practical devices are required if DST is to thrive. Additionally, the expansion of digitizable scent libraries will be crucial in broadening its uptake.

We must also consider the societal implications of this technology. How will it change our interactions, our experiences, and our industries? The answers to these questions will shape the trajectory of DST.

Digital Scent Technology: Not to Be Sniffed At

DST still has a long road to travel to join sight & vision as part of the digital experience. But the technology exists, and only time will tell if the streaming video of the future is available in "smell-o-vision" or not.

Certainly, the list of potential applications will act as a driving force, and almost equally certainly, early "mainstream" versions will be of limited use. But this is a path that many everyday technologies have already successfully trod.

For DST, the future smells promising.

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

A Concept of Digital Scent/Smell Technology: An Underrated Technology

Innovation has till date have the capacity to utilize our feeling of site and sound effectively in conveying virtual reality and closer to reality. Thusly you have practical looking diversions, and realistic cards that are fit for rendering them; mice that let you encounter the territory you are crossing, regardless of whether in an application, on the web, or on a CD-ROM; and sound and music, because of MP3 and so forth, which bring alive your involvement in the virtual world. Virtual reality has, since the beginning a very long while prior, been ruled by visual jolts, with material and sound-related data research and added to the sense in the last years.

Related Papers

Linda Solay

This study's purpose was to investigate principal challenges and exhibition strategies for scent art; surveying current approaches and solutions used and developed by today’s small, but growing number of scent artists. Since such previously non-existent practical information is essential for any artist seeking to successfully exhibit their scent-based work and institutions seeking maintain a high standard of exhibition quality, this study focused on developing an information framework for effective exhibition practices in scent art, whilst simultaneously fostering the building of awareness around scent art in principal.

Ravilla VenkataKrishnaiah

Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization

Gitte Lindgaard

Stavroula Karapapa

Yasuyuki Yanagida

Recently, olfactory interfaces, in addition to visual, auditory, and haptic interfaces, have been examined to enhance the sensation of presence for virtual reality. We have proposed the concept of "projection-based olfactory display" and have developed several prototype systems to realize this concept. A projection-based olfactory display applies the principle of vortex rings launched from an air cannon to deliver a

IEEE Virtual Reality Conference (VR 2006)

Kimberly Pollard

The use of vision and audition in stealth applications is well recognized; however, other perceptual senses can also play a valuable role. This report discusses the sense of smell (olfaction), its use in nature and everyday life, and its potential applications in military and stealth operations. The sense of smell has largely been overlooked and underutilized in warfare, being restricted to crowd control and deterrent applications. However, the olfactory dimension can be a promising addition to other Department of Defense applications, such as stealth operations, deception, misdirection, and force projection. Further research into olfaction is needed to achieve these aims. The U.S. Army Research Laboratory’s (ARL’s) Special Report ARL-SR-242 Owning the Environment: Stealth Soldier—Research Outline (May 2012) presented an outline of the visual and auditory research needed to support future military stealth operations, misdirection, and deception activities. The current report expands...

In our research, we aim to construct an olfactory delivery system for cars that can be used to keep a driver who is at risk of falling asleep awake. This system releases aromas at a specific time and at a specific place. Furthermore, as this system delivers pleasant aromas, it improves passengers' levels of comfort. Some researches have examined the effect of aromas on levels of alertness. We further assume that the way used to deliver the aroma is also very important because of the rapid adaptation of the human olfactory perception system. We examine whether temporary and spatially located delivery of aromas can wake up sleepy subjects better than when aromas are delivered at a constant rate.

Anne Nieuwhof

This thesis examines the notion of productive multisensory experiences in museums of modern and contemporary art, as well as the pedagogy of current olfactory curatorial strategies and fruitful conceptual tools for such future strategies in art museums. It sets out to develop a theoretical framework for understanding immersive, multisensory art museum experiences as meaningful and educative. The sense of smell functions exemplary in this for it is an exceptional multisensory sensation in itself that requires thorough reconceptualization since it has long been repressed in Western epistemology.

Katherine Annett-Hitchcock

RELATED PAPERS

FEMS Immunology & …

David McMillan

Boris Ivanov

Revista Brasileira de Estudos de Defesa

Naiane Cossul

Manuela Salvador

Marjolein Hageman

Europhysics Letters (EPL)

Danyel Soares

Cristovam Wanderley Picanço Diniz

The journal of nutrition, health & aging

Carmen Pérez Rodrigo

DALIA PEÑA ISLAS

Revista Colombiana de Entomología

Fondo Editorial-VCTI UAN

Entomological Research

Yang-Seop Bae

Engineering and Scientific International Journal

ALIYU IBRAHIM KABKARA

Si Somos Americanos

Victoria Martínez

Olivier Poch

The Journal of Sexual Medicine

rosa mancina

Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine

Cecilia Chan

Tanjung Nugroho

Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans

Jonas Nycander

Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research

Paola Molin

Revista Topoi

Topoi. Revista de História

hulda gestsdottir

Lasers in Surgery and Medicine

Peter Gunvén

Computers and Electronics in Agriculture

veronique gomes

arXiv (Cornell University)

Leopoldo Bertossi

Ethiopian Journal of Health Development

Berhanu Erko

RELATED TOPICS

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

‘Smell is really important for social communication’: how technology is ruining our senses

Scientists say an overreliance on sight and sound is having a detrimental effect on people’s wellbeing and that our devices should deliver a multisensory experience

“W ait a minute, wait a minute. You ain’t heard nothing yet.” So went the first line of audible dialogue in a feature film, 1927’s The Jazz Singer . It was one of the first times that mass media had conveyed the sight and sound of a scene together, and the audience was enthralled.

There have been improvements since: black and white has become colour, frame rates and resolutions have increased and sound quality has improved, but the media we consume still caters overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, to our eyes and ears.

With the average person’s screen time now nearly seven hours a day, and much of that time spent indoors, our overreliance on sight and sound has only intensified. But given that humans are animals with five (or arguably many more ) senses, are we neglecting our other faculties, and what is it doing to us?

Many psychologists categorise our main senses as being either rational or emotional, and there is evidence to back it up. “Smell [and taste are] directly connected to the emotional processing areas of the brain,” says Charles Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at Oxford University, “whereas the rational senses like hearing and vision get processed in the cortex.” In fact, Spence says, more than half of the neocortex – itself more than half the volume of the brain – is given over to processing what we see.

There is no denying that we are highly visual creatures and that is partly why our media are primarily audiovisual. “I think it’s mostly driven by the fact that a lot of the information that we consider important today can be conveyed via visual or auditory means,” says Meike Scheller, an assistant professor in the department of psychology at Durham University. “But what we consider important doesn’t necessarily mean these are the things that we need.”

If you ask people which sense they could not live without, most will say sight, but evidence suggests what we would really miss is our sense of smell. “There’s a much higher rate of suicide and suicidal ideations among people with anosmia, because it’s a sense that’s so strongly linked to our emotions,” says Scheller.

So is neglecting some senses in favour of others affecting our emotional lives? In as much as our emotional health is tied to our social health, the answer is almost certainly yes. “Smell is a really important cue for social communication and this is something that’s not implemented in any technology we’re using today,” says Scheller.

For example, it has been shown that we tend to sniff our palms unconsciously after shaking hands with someone. “That gives you hints about all sorts of things, from their health, to their age, even their personality,” says Spence. “A fair amount of that’s lost if we’re interacting digitally only.”

Touch is similarly important to our emotional lives, and in ways that the finger-focused haptics of our digital devices cannot satisfy. C-tactile afferents, a kind of nerve receptor abundant on the hairy skin of our arms (but not the pads of our fingers), have been shown to create positive emotions when stimulated. “These receptors like slow, warm, tactile stroking,” says Spence.

The cold, sleek touchscreen of a smartphone simply cannot replace the soft, warm, imperceptibly smelly skin of another human. For adults, this may mean less satisfying social lives, but for a generation of children who are increasingly being socialised through technology, the effects could be severe.

Scheller says that children learns to interpret their senses with reference to each other. We might learn to associate some subtle odour with the sound of a person shouting or the sight of them smiling and use these signals to navigate social situations in future. “Those children growing up with less input basically have less training in being able to categorise how certain things smell, or what a certain touch might mean,” says Scheller. “If all of a sudden we take something away that has evolved over millions of years, that will not only be the removal of one sense, but it will affect how all the other senses work.”

Marianna Obrist, professor of multisensory interfaces at University College London, says: “The way we experience everyday life is for all our senses. Everything is multisensory.”

For instance, it is easy to think of the experience of eating as being primarily about taste, but our food’s shape and colour, smell and sizzle, temperature, texture and weight appeal to our vision, olfaction, audition and touch. “All those senses have already started playing before you’re even eating,” Obrist says. And then there is mouthfeel: the physical sensations of spiciness or sourness and of course the flavour.

Removing just one of those senses can have an impact on the whole experience. For example, when people eat ice-cream in the dark they are less likely to enjoy it , or even be certain what it tastes like. “Whenever we have multisensory stimulation, we get a much better and richer representation of the environment around us,” says Scheller.

S o what are we doing to make our technology more multisensory? Obrist previously headed SenseX , an EU-funded project aimed at helping designers conceive new ways of integrating touch, smell and taste into their products. The team’s efforts included spraying odours under a subject’s nose to heighten key moments of Christopher Nolan’s film Interstellar , blasting them with ultrasound waves to simulate touch and using high-intensity acoustics to levitate food on to the tongue without needing wires or tubes.

It is hard to imagine that anytime soon you will watch Robert Duvall’s Lt Col Kilgore deliver Apocalypse Now ’s most famous line while your laptop spritzes eau de napalm-in-the-morning up your nose, but smell and taste interfaces may be on the horizon. Researchers are already using AI to try and find primary odours from which any smell can be concocted, and Obrist is the chief scientific officer of OWidgets, a company that produces digitally controlled scent delivery systems with applications in research, healthcare and immersive reality experiences.

There are also companies such as Dexta Robotics in China that are bringing tactility to virtual reality with a glove it calls the Dexmo .

after newsletter promotion

“Dexmo can provide tactile feedback and force feedback at the same time,” says Dexta chief executive Aler Gu, “meaning when you scroll your fingers through a virtual brick, you can feel the texture of the surface. When you grab and move the brick from one point to the other, you can feel the physical shape.”

Media that harnesses all the senses would surely enrich our daily interactions with technology, but it is not hard to imagine more insidious uses emerging. In 1957, an American market researcher named James Vicary claimed to have spliced single frames reading “Eat popcorn” and “Drink Coca-Cola” into a film. He reported a 57.5% and 18.1% rise in popcorn and Coca-Cola sales respectively, and the concept of subliminal advertising was born.

Vicary was later exposed as a fraud and the efficacy of subliminal advertising has been a matter of debate ever since, but would technology that could digitally deliver smells and tastes be a gift to unscrupulous advertisers? “Our bodies have a very strong emotional response to [these senses]. They can be extremely powerful,” says Scheller. “It has great potential to influence our decisions because we are very emotional decision-makers.”

Studies have shown that exposure to certain tastes and odours can influence our judgment of other people’s appearance and personality, and even alter our behaviour. Tasting bitter foods, for example, can make us hostile , and a 2005 patent application suggests the smell of pink grapefruit will make a man perceive a woman to be younger than her actual age.

Obrist’s team has found that sour tastes can make us more willing to partake in risky behaviour . “You might be doing some e-banking or online shopping, and you’re drinking your sour lemon drink, and that might indirectly influence your decisions,” she says, and it is not hard to imagine how an e-commerce or gambling app may exploit devices that can deliver tastes and smells.

To an extent, this kind of thing is already happening. Companies are known to pump pleasant scents into their shops, and American chain Cinnabon deliberately places ovens near store entrances , sometimes baking trays of just sugar and cinnamon, to entice passing shoppers.

And what if we take it even further? Of the nearly 63 million people who voted for Donald Trump in 2016, the vast majority had only experienced him through two of their senses. What if media outlets used our devices to deliver a subtle aroma of soured milk while airing a speech by one political candidate and freshly baked biscuits for another?

After all, a study from 1940 showed that people were significantly more or less likely to identify with political slogans such as “Down with war and fascism!”, “Workers of the world unite!” and “America for Americans!” depending on whether they were subjected to a putrid smell or given a free lunch.

If the news allowed us and our leaders to taste air pollution in Delhi, feel wildfires in California, or smell the smoke and sewage in Gaza, would the appeal to our more emotional senses move us to act, or to bury our heads deeper in the sand? It is hard to imagine a willing audience for such a sensory assault, but our senses evolved to help us navigate and respond to the world we live in, and from that point of view, only using two of them cannot be ideal. “The more information we have,” says Scheller, “the more able we are to actually act within our environment.”

For the time being, instead of holding out for digital technologies that can stimulate our neglected senses, Scheller suggests we may do well to go outside and see our friends in person, feel the breeze on our skin, smell the roses. After all, as far as our devices go, we ain’t smelled nothing yet.

• The Observer
• Health & wellbeing
• Advertising
• Smartphones

Most viewed

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

The spatial spillover effect of green technology innovation on water pollution --evidence from 283 chinese cities provisionally accepted.

• 1 Fudan Development Institute, Fudan University, China
• 2 School of Customs and Public Economics, Shanghai Customs College, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

While economic development brings serious environmental problems, technological advances can effectively reduce pollution, which helps to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Although the impact of green technology innovation on atmospheric pollutants and carbon emissions has been extensively studied, the effect of such innovation on pollutant reduction varies due to the diverse regional distribution characteristics of different pollutants. Thus, this paper contributes to the literature by examining the influence of green technology innovation on water pollution from a regional perspective, with a particular emphasis on the pronounced clustering of wastewater pollution in China's coastal areas. Our findings reveal a significant U-shaped relationship between technology innovation and water pollution, as measured by both industrial wastewater and the ratio of unprocessed sewage. Interestingly, this pollution reduction effect also exhibits a U-shaped spatial spillover. Given the rapid development of the digital economy, it can further amplify the spatial spillover effect of green innovation, especially in eastern regions. This study also provides recent empirical evidence from China to the Environmental Kuznets Curve.

Keywords: green technical innovation, Water polllution, Spatial spillover, Environmental kuznets curve, China

Received: 29 Feb 2024; Accepted: 17 Apr 2024.

Copyright: © 2024 Ruan and Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Dr. Anqi Zhang, Shanghai Customs College, School of Customs and Public Economics, pudong, China

People also looked at