It is hard to make decisions when being pressured by so many appetizing advertisements everywhere but soon, your sense of smell may be used to impulse you enough to get you to buy their product.
There are a few systems out there that attempt incorporate the sense of smell to enhance virtual reality but no solution has been widely adopted yet. In the 1960’s, a movie called the Scent of Mystery was supposed to introduce the concept of dynamically changing smell according to the scene on screen, but after a mechanical failure, the gimmick never took off. Sixty years later, the concept is still being explored.
A system designed by Hakura Matsukura, from the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, is the first to create the illusion that a smell is emanating from a certain image on the screen. The best part about it is that the system does not require a special screen.
Tiny gel capsules containing scent chemicals are vaporized to release their smell. The scent can then be positioned accurately on the screen using tiny fans that blow parallel to the display’s surface across each diagonal. The coordinates of the smelly image are fed to the system and perfect adjustment of airflow out of each fan can maneuver the smell so that it appears to emanate only out of the desired object on screen. People that have tried it say that the fans are so gentle that the smell seems to be wafting from the screen.
Smelling Screen concept (via University of Tokyo)
The fans are supported on vertical metal angles that sit like towers on either side of the television and position them at each corner. The current prototype can only hold smell capsules of one smell at a time but Matsukura envisions a cartridge, like the one for your printer, which can offer between a few sets of smells. Matsukura says that using future iterations of this system, a person will be able to follow a landscape of smells across the screen, smelling various scents according to the images.
Matsukura says this technology could be used in museums to make displays more realistic and of course by advertisements, like those on the subway platform. Matsukura used help from his colleagues, Tatsuhiro Yoneda and Hiroshi Ishida to design the smell-o-vision system. The screen was demonstrated at this year’s IEEE Virtual Reality Conference in Orlando.
C
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