An unencumbering, localized olfactory display

Olfaction is considered to be an important sensory modality in next-generation virtual reality (VR) systems. We cur-rently focus on spatiotemporal control of odor, rather than capturing and synthesizing odor itself. If we simply dif-fused the odor into the atmosphere, it would be difficult to clean it away in a short time. Several olfactory displays that inject the scented air under the nose through tubes have been proposed to realize spatiotemporal control of olfac-tion, but they require the user to wear something on one’s face. Here, we propose an unencumbering olfactory dis-play, by conveying a clump of scented air from a certain remote place to the user’s nose. To implement this concept, we used an “air cannon ” that generates toroidal vortices of the scented air. We conducted a preliminary experiment to examine the possibility of this method’s ability to display scent to a restricted space. The result shows that we could successfully display incense to the target user.