Thin, Soft, Skin-integrated Olfactory Interface

Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR & AR) provide simulated experience to users that allow users feel visual, auditory, or even tactile information virtually, and thus can be used in diverse fields such as entertainment, training and medical applications. The current VR & AR technologies mainly rely on 3D glasses with auditory functions, while recent advances of wearable haptic technologies bring tactile sensation in a thin soft way into the system, which significantly enhance the application areas. However, olfaction sensation as one of the most important sensations is a field far unexplored, especially for portable or even thin, soft skin-interface formats. Equally important to visual, auditory and tactile sensations, olfaction exerts both physiological and psychological influences on humans. The development of technologies for olfaction sensations and feedback exhibits significant meanings in both academic and industry, where olfactory interface is the key to provide olfaction sensations to human body. To provide intelligent olfactory feedback in a small localized area, new wearable olfaction interfacing technologies should exhibit advances as following: (a) the whole system should be built up on a soft substrate in a wearable or even skin-integrated format with miniaturized size and light weight; (b) as many odors with adjustable concentrations and long operation duration to support long term utilization without frequent replacement/maintenance; (c) the olfactory interface should support wireless and programmable operation, capable of interacting with users for various applications. (d) the odor sources should be easy-access and biocompatible. (e) rapid response time in bursting or suppressing odors and accurate odor concentration control are required for the olfaction system in VR/AR applications. Here, we propose a concept of skin-interfaced olfactory feedback systems with wirelessly, programmable capabilities based on arrays of flexible and miniaturized odor generators for olfactory VR applications. We are aiming at optimizing the materials selection, design layout, and power management to allow the proposed olfaction interface to exhibit outstanding device performance in various aspects, from response rate, to odor concentration control, to long-term continuous operation, to high mechanical/electrical stability and to low power consumption. The success of the proposed idea will enable a broad range of applications, such as for 4D movie watching, smell message delivery, medical treatment, human emotion control and VR/AR based online teaching, and therefore will offer the great potential of the soft olfaction interface in various practical scenarios, including entertainment, education, human machine interfaces and so on.