Many people are understandably excited by the suggestion that the chemical senses can be digitized; be it to deliver ambient fragrances (e.g., in virtual reality or health-related applications), or else to transmit flavour experiences via the internet. However, to date, progress in this area has been surprisingly slow. Furthermore, the majority of the attempts at successful commercialization have failed, often in the face of consumer ambivalence over the perceived benefits/utility. In this review, with the focus squarely on the domain of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), we summarize the state-of-the-art in the area. We highlight the key possibilities and pitfalls as far as stimulating the so-called 'lower' senses of taste, smell, and the trigeminal system are concerned. Ultimately, we suggest that mixed reality solutions are currently the most plausible as far as delivering (or rather modulating) flavour experiences digitally is concerned. The key problems with digital fragrance delivery are related to attention and attribution. People often fail to detect fragrances when they are concentrating on something else; And even when they detect that their chemical senses have been stimulated, there is always a danger that they attribute their experience (e.g., pleasure) to one of the other senses-this is what we call 'the fundamental attribution error'. We conclude with an outlook on digitizing the chemical senses and summarize a set of open-ended questions that the HCI community has to address in future explorations of smell and taste as interaction modalities.
In this paper, we introduce a new technology, which allows people to share taste and smell sensations digitally with a remote person through existing networking technologies such as the Internet. By introducing this technology, we expect people to share their smell and taste experiences with their family and friends remotely. Sharing these senses are immensely beneficial since those are strongly associated with individual memories, emotions, and everyday experiences. As the initial step, we developed a control system, an actuator, which could digitally stimulate the sense of taste remotely. The system uses two approaches to stimulate taste sensations digitally: the electrical and thermal stimulations on tongue. Primary results suggested that sourness and saltiness are the main sensations that could be evoked through this device. Furthermore, this paper focuses on future aspects of such technology for remote smell actuation followed by applications and possibilities for further developments.
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