A Nose-Tracked, Personal Olfactory Display
Yasuyuki Yanagida*, Shinjiro Kawato*, Haruo Noma*, Nobuji Tetsutani*
ATR Media Information Science Labs.
Abstract
An interface that involves all five senses, including olfaction,
would be the ultimate interface for virtual reality (VR). We aretrying to construct an olfactory display that does not require theuser to wear anything on the face. We used an “air cannon” totransport small packets of scented air to the user’s nose from somenearby place. In this paper, we report the ongoing development ofan olfactory display system with a nose-tracking feature by incorporating vision-based face tracking technology.

Akira Tomono‡
Dept. of Information Media Technology
Tokai University

detect and track the user’s eyes and nose in real time. The scentprojector is composed of an air cannon, scent generator (currentlya simple commercially-available scent diffuser), and a 2 degreesof-freedom platform. The platform is controlled so that the air
cannon aim at a point just under the user’s nose.

1 Introduction
Our VR experience so far has been a kind of a “journey in aspacesuit,” as we have not acquired ways to feel the atmosphere.
It might be effective for obtaining sensation of presence to makefull use of the air as a medium. The origin of this approach could
be found in Heilig’s Sensorama [Heilig 1992] (system appeared in1962), and some researchers have already started to explore thepossibility of olfactory displays for VR [Barfield and Danas 1996].
However, olfactory displays are still not so popular.
There are many difficulties to realize general-purpose olfactory displays. One major problem is that there is no counterpart of
the “three primary colors” in olfaction; this means that it is difficult to provide “virtual alternatives,” and that we might always
have to come up with “real” scent. We are not attempting to develop sensing or synthesizing technologies. Our current focus ison display technology that provides easy-to-use, unencumbering
personal olfactory displays.

2 Principle
One of the problems in interactive olfactory displays has been thespatio-temporal controllability, i.e., once the scent was diffused
into the space, it was hard to extinguish it. A direct way of solving
this problem is to transfer the scented air through a tube and attach
the end of the tube under the nose [Hirose et al. 2000]. However,people may not want to wear any encumbering devices or trailingtubes to enjoy scent. Consequently, we explore a way to transfer
scented air through free space, and find that a so-called “air cannon” could be used for this purpose.
An air cannon (also known as a vortex cannon) is a chamberwith a circular aperture, and it launches a small clump of air(doughnut-shaped vortex) that can travel several meters. According to our preliminary experiment [Yanagida et al. 2003], wecould successfully transfer the scented air from 1–2 m away to theuser’s nose. If we track the user’s nose and control the direction of
the air cannon, we can configure a nose-tracked, personal olfactory display that provides a short-time switch of scent.

3 System Configuration
The system consists of a nose tracker and a scent projector. The
nose tracker is a modified version of a vision-based eye tracking
technology [Kawato and Tetsutani 2002]. It uses the “Betweenthe-Eyes” pattern instead of the eyes themselves, and can robustly*e-mail: {yanagida | skawato | noma | tetsutani}@atr.co.jp
e-mail: tomono@keyaki.cc.u-tokai.ac.jp‡Figure 1. System components: a vision-based nose tracker anda scent projector using an “air cannon.”The air cannon is driven gently so that the user feels a waft ofincense reaching his/her nose. The user can sense the scent at themoment when the clump of air arrives, and the scent diminishes ina short time. Other people can hardly sense the scent, as long as
the scent projector successfully aims at a certain user.
Future works include the development of switching mechanism for multiple incenses, improvement of the performance of aircannon, and practical evaluation of the system.

Acknowledgements
This research was conducted as part of “Research on interaction
media for high-speed & intelligent networking,” with funding
from the Telecommunications Advancement Organization of Japan.

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