Digital Olfactory Displays: Bringing Smell into Human–Machine Interaction

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Philipp Müller, Senior Research Fellow at Tampere University, Finland, and Academy Research Fellow of the Research Council of Finland, will be presenting at the 9th World Congress on Digital Olfaction (DOS 2026) this December in Tokyo.

Olfactory digitalization, also known as digital scent technology, aims at sensing, transmitting, and recreating odors to enrich experiences, for example, in virtual reality. The general idea in odor recreation is to create a synthetic odor using a set of (key) odor components to imitate an existing odor. The concept is inspired by color vision, where any color can be replicated using a mixture of the three primary colors red, green, and blue. However, for imitating or recreating odors no primary odors exists [1] and finding the accurate blending ratio of the components is, in general, non-trivial. Thus, methods for creating synthetic odors and comparing them to existing odors are required. For producing the synthetic odors, so-called olfactory displays (OD) are frequently used [2-5]. Olfactory displays enable generating, blending, and controlling odors emitted from a set of odors stored within to a designated environment (see [1] and references within). These devices are, in general, highly complex and require careful design for producing the desired odors.

In this talk, a self-learning multichannel olfactory display will be presented. The device measures an original odor with a Differential Mobility Spectrometry (DMS) device and autonomously searches, using a differential evolution algorithm, for a synthetic odor matching the DMS measurement of the original odor. The talk will present simulation results as well as results from tests with real odors. Finally, conclusion on the use of the self-learning multichannel olfactory display in human-machine interaction will be presented.