Wearable Olfactory Display for Museum Exhibitions

Abstract

The use of odors in different areas, such as marketing, entertainment, wellbeing, and arts is nowadays calling increasing attention. Various types of olfactory displays to integrate into Virtual Reality applications have been proposed in recent years. Actually, several characteristics of the sense of smell and of odors still remain not fully understood, and the development of olfactory displays presents a high level of complexity. Therefore, new strategies for the development of more reliable and effective olfactory displays are required.This paper presents a wearable olfactory display, based on solid fragrances, to integrate into multisensory applications for museum exhibitions. The motivation is that the use of odors can be particularly effective for improving the users’ involvement, comprehension and experience of art exhibitions. The paper also describes the experimental setup for the evaluation of the display.