Your VR headset can soon let you smell the virtual world

Virtual Reality can deliver a truly immersive experience. It has come a long way since its inception and can now deliver sharp visuals with surround sound audio. However, there’s one frontier it has still not conquered, and that’s smell. Smell is an essential part of human experience, and its absence in the VR world leaves something to be desired. 

That might change now, as a team of researchers at the Institute of Science Tokyo, in collaboration with Rakuten Mobile, has developed a wearable device that introduces smell to the VR world. It can blend up to eight different scents in real time and deliver them synchronized with your virtual environment.

How does it work?

The device is small enough to wear alongside a regular VR headset. It reads the virtual scene you are in and generates a matching scent by blending fragrance components in precise ratios. So if you are

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