“nioi café: olfactory display system with visual feedback” by Nambu, Narumi, Nishimura, Tanikawa and Hirose

Olfaction stimulates our emotion most vividly among five senses, so it is effective to use scent as a medium for communication. Thinking olfactory display device like monitor device, the diversity of scent becomes a critical problem. In order to show hundreds of thousands kinds of scent one by one, as many as hundreds of thousands of scented substances are needed and it is impossible to be achieved. Then, we need to restrict the number of scent sources in olfactory displays. In this research, we use knowledge of cognitive psychology that olfaction is susceptible to other senses, especially vision. Practically, we suppose a new method presenting a scent and a picture not corresponding with the scent at the same time and giving an olfactory illusion, in other words, having audience smell not what they actually smell but what they see.

1. H. Ito et al.: Chūshouteki nioi yougo to gutaiteki nioi yougo no kankei, the Japanese Society for Food Science and Technology, pp. 581–594, 1991.