Playing with Smell: Digital Olfaction in Games, Immersion and Training

We are pleased to announce that Simon Niedenthal from Malmö University, Sweden, will be presenting at the 9th World Congress on Digital Olfaction (DOS 2026) this December in Tokyo.

Imagine if you could capture a smell with a mobile device and send it to a friend. The gold standard of digital olfaction is to do for smell what we already do with images and sound: capture with sensors, digitise and transmit, and output through a display. Clearly we are not there yet, on either the sensing or the display side. An electronic nose is not close to a human nose, and its data means little until we can map it onto human experience. What areas of practice digital and material open up around this gap? Drawing on interaction design, this talk will share examples of how Professor Niedenthal’s research group designs for scent in digital, physical and interactive contexts.

Professor Niedenthal explains: ‘This work moves across three areas of practice. Embodied interaction, where scent becomes part of how we grasp, gesture and inhabit virtual space. Participatory sensing, where low-cost e-noses built from off-the-shelf components open olfaction to environmental and civic knowledge-making. And finally speculative futuring, where scent’s relational, intersubjective qualities become material for imagining desired worlds together. Rather than a single pipeline from capture to output, olfactory interaction design is plural, unfolding through the hand, the neighbourhood, and the future.’