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BIOTECH

Virtual Reality System Lets You

Stop and Smell the Roses
A wireless device worn on the face or lip can produce
fragrances such as lavender and green tea in a virtual
world

By Simon Makin on May 9, 2023

Researchers have developed a wearable system that produces

scents in virtual reality. Credit: Xinge Yu

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Virtual reality is already widespread in

entertainment and is starting to spread to fields
ranging from education to health care. But while
vision and hearing interfaces are extremely
advanced, and touch, or “haptics,” is improving,
one key sense has been missing from the virtual
world: smell.

That may be about to change. Engineer Xinge Yu

of the City University of Hong Kong and his
colleagues have developed a lightweight, flexible
and wireless olfactory interface that can precisely
deliver smells such as lavender, pineapple or
green tea to VR users and more fully immerse
them in scented virtual worlds. “Bringing smell
into VR expands it into another dimension,” Yu
says. “We wanted to develop something in a
wearable, skin-integrated format that people can
go anywhere with and use anytime.”

The team’s design was described in a paper

published on Tuesday in Nature
Communications. A key advantage is that it can
control odor intensity. One demonstration in the
study involved increasing the intensity of the
smell generated as a woman in a four-
dimensional movie brought a rose up to her nose.

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Smelling rose in VR

Previous smell interfaces have typically used

bottles of liquid perfume, an atomizer (a device
that turns liquids into a fine mist) and some
method of blowing the atomized droplets out.
This works, but it is rigid and has limited
operating time between refills, and it does not
easily allow for controlling intensity. These
drawbacks have made the devices less practical
for VR systems.

The new design uses small paraffin wax pads

infused with scents that are heated by an
electrode to release an odor. A temperature-
dependent resistor, or thermistor, senses the
temperature, which controls the smell’s intensity.
And a magnetic induction coil controls a metal
plate that conducts heat away from the electrode
to rapidly cool it down and shut off the scent.
Arrays of these odor generators, which are
millimeters in size, are incorporated into thin,
flexible sheets of electronics.

The study describes two different device formats.

The first is small enough that it can be stuck to a
user’s top lip, but it includes only two odor
generators. The second is worn like a face mask
and has nine. Both are customizable with a
selection of 30 odors, including gardenia,
caramel, ginger, clove, mojito and coconut milk.
Different combinations can be blended at varying
intensities to create a palette of thousands of
possible fragrances.

The proximity to the user’s nose, together with

clever engineering, allows for delays between
activating and receiving a smell as short as 1.44
seconds. Atomizers are faster than this, but they
lack the control of the new devices and are as
small as they are ever going to get, says Judith
Amores, a senior researcher at Microsoft
Research and a research affiliate at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who
studies olfactory interfaces for health
applications but was not involved in the study.
“An advantage of this system is they could
miniaturize it even more,” she says. “That’s
what’s exciting.”

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The study includes demonstrations of possible

applications beyond just augmenting VR,
including communicating messages by smell and
evoking emotions. The researchers suggest the
devices could even be used to alleviate depressed
mood or promote recall in people with age-
related cognitive decline. “Scent is directly
connected to the emotional and memory parts of
the brain, so there are a lot of applications
related to well-being and health,” Amores says.
“It could also be used as a way to do olfactory
training to help people who lost their sense of
smell due to COVID.”

The researchers have already started shrinking

things down further. They have a system that’s
two to three times smaller now, and they aim to
shrink it to something five to 10 times smaller in
the future. “That’s the next step,” Yu says.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Simon Makin is a freelance science journalist

based in the U.K. His work has appeared in New
Scientist, the Economist, Scientific American and
Nature,, among others. He covers the life
sciences and specializes in neuroscience,
psychology and mental health. Follow Makin on
Twitter @SimonMakin. Credit: Nick Higgins

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