Projection-Based Olfactory Display with Nose Tracking

• Authors: Yasuyuki Yanagida;Shinjiro Kawato;Haruo Noma;Akira Tomono;Nobuji Tetsutani
• Venue: VR '04 Proceedings of the IEEE Virtual Reality 2004
• Year: 2004

Most attempts to realize an olfactory display haveinvolved capturing and synthesizing the odor, processesthat still pose many challenging problems. These difficultiesare mainly due to the mechanism of human olfaction,in which a set of so-called "primary odors" has not beenfound. Instead, we focus on spatio-temporal control ofodor rather than synthesizing odor itself. Many existinginteractive olfactory displays simply diffuse the scent intothe air, which does not provide the ability of spatio-temporalcontrol of olfaction. Recently, however, severalresearchers have developed olfactory displays that injectscented air under the nose through tubes. On the analogyof visual displays, these systems correspond to head-mounteddisplays (HMD). These yield a solid way toachieve spatio-temporal control of olfactory space, butthey require the user to wear something on his or her face.Here, we propose an unencumbering olfactory displaythat does not require the user to attach anything on theface. It works by projecting a clump of scented air from alocation near the user's nose through free space. We alsoaim to display a scent to the restricted space around aspecific user's nose, rather than scattering scented air bysimply diffusing it into the atmosphere. To implement thisconcept, we used an "air cannon" that generates toroidalvortices of the scented air. We conducted a preliminaryexperiment to examine this method's ability to displayscent to a restricted space. The results show that we couldsuccessfully display incense to the target user. Next, weconstructed prototype systems. We could successfullybring the scented air to a specific user by tracking thenose position of the user and controlling the orientationof the air cannon to the user's nose.