SCENTAUR - An Encountered-Type Olfactory Display for Large-Scale Smell Interaction in Virtual Reality

Recent years have shown a greater interest in incorporating the sense of smell into Virtual Reality (VR) through olfactory displays designed to generate and deliver scent stimuli in virtual environments. Current designs often rely on stationary devices (preventing large-scale or mobile scent delivery in the workspace) or wearable devices (that may be cumbersome to users), missing opportunities to consider the use of robots to deliver smell in a large-scale workspace to improve immersive VR. This paper introduces SCENTAUR, an Encountered-Type Olfactory Display (ETOD) featuring a stationary smell display attached to a mobile robot that can navigate and display smell in a large workspace to allow users to experience smell in VR while walking in a virtual environment without wearing additional equipment. We evaluated the usability of SCENTAUR in providing a perceptible large-scale smell interaction in VR through a user study. The findings highlight that SCENTAUR can be a plausible olfactory display that interacts with a walk-based VR setup. As a part of our contribution, a proof of concept was designed to illustrate our approach. We discuss our results based on the current state-of-the-art smell displays in VR and the design implications of ETODs where SCENTAUR could improve spatial user(s) interaction.