Your VR headset can soon let you smell the virtual world

Virtual Reality can deliver a truly immersive experience. It has come a long way since its inception and can now deliver sharp visuals with surround sound audio. However, there’s one frontier it has still not conquered, and that’s smell. Smell is an essential part of human experience, and its absence in the VR world leaves something to be desired. 

That might change now, as a team of researchers at the Institute of Science Tokyo, in collaboration with Rakuten Mobile, has developed a wearable device that introduces smell to the VR world. It can blend up to eight different scents in real time and deliver them synchronized with your virtual environment.

How does it work?

The device is small enough to wear alongside a regular VR headset. It reads the virtual scene you are in and generates a matching scent by blending fragrance components in precise ratios. So if you are virtually strolling through a pine forest or a beachside market, your nose gets the memo, too.

The team used a combination of a microdispenser, an ultrasound atomizer, and a tiny pump to control the amount and moment of fragrance released. The researchers tested the device with virtual travel content, allowing users to visit different locations and smell the scents of those places. 

Professor Takamichi Nakamoto, who led the research, explained the goal: “We wanted to develop a system that could reproduce complex scents quickly during immersive virtual experiences.” 

The result is a scent that comes quickly and fades cleanly, without leaving you smelling as if you have spent hours inside a perfume store. Participants reported that the addition of smell made the virtual environment feel more real and present.

Can smelling VR worlds do more than entertain you?

Potentially, yes. We already see scent being used in 4DX cinema experience, so there’s no doubt that it can be used in virtual entertainment. Beyond gaming and entertainment, the technology could be genuinely useful for training simulations, fragrance product demonstrations, and even therapy for elderly patients, since smell is closely tied to memory.

The device was shown at multiple international conferences, and early reactions from attendees were positive. There is still a long road between a research prototype and something you can buy, but this is one of the more exciting steps toward truly multi-sensory VR experiences.