This paper shows our research effort towards the development of a visual-olfactory presentation system using a miniaturized olfactory display. The proposed system can present smell synchronously with the movie displayed on the screen. The olfactory display is composed of electroosmotic (EO) pumps and a surface acoustic wave (SAW) device to store liquid odorants and atomize them forcibly into smells. It is suitable for scents generation with movie because of the capability to generate smells rapidly even the scents of low-volatile substances which typically require long time to be released. A user can enjoy the video with scents by using this system without smell persistence. Lastly, a sensory test was conducted to evaluate the proposed system.

Recently, the research on olfactory display for incorporating the sense of smell into virtual reality has gradually expanded. To present odors with a vivid sense of smell, an ability to generate a variety of odors with efficient speed is indispensible. In this paper, we developed a new type of olfactory display, composed of a miniaturized electroosmotic pump and a surface acoustic wave device for presenting the low-volatile scents that are conventionally difficult to be generated with acceptable speed. We used an odor sensing system to evaluate the capability to present the low volatile scent and the ability to blend smells of our proposed new type olfactory display.

This article shows our research efforts toward the development of an olfactory display system for presenting odors with a vivid sense of reality. A multi-component olfactory display is developed, which enables generation of a variety of odors by blending multiple odor vapors with arbitrary ratios. In this research demo, the two contents using the olfactory display will be demonstrated. The first one is the experiment on odor approximation using odor components extracted from a mass spectrum database. The second one is the reproduction of video with smell. The temporal changes of odor kind and its concentration can be recorded and can be presented together with movie obtained from a Web camera. People can enjoy the recorded video with scents.