Evaluating Industrial Products in an Innovative Visual-Olfactory Environment

Abstract

The sense of smell has a great importance in our daily life. Recently, smells have been used for marketing purposes for improving the people's mood and for communicating information about products as household cleaners and food. However, the scent design discipline can be used for creating a “scent identity” of these products not traditionally associated to a specific smell, in order to communicate their features to customers. In the area of virtual reality (VR), several researches concerned the integration of smells in virtual environments. The research questions addressed in this paper concern if virtual prototypes (VP), including smell simulation, can be used for evaluating products as effectively as studies performed in real environments, and also if smells can enhance the users' sense of presence in virtual environments. For this purpose, a VR experimental framework including a prototype of a wearable olfactory display (wOD) has been set up, and experimental tests have been carried out.