ABSTRACT

The sense of smell provides a continuous stream of critical information about our environment, which we use to drive decisions every day. Smells cue us to potentially dangerous situations, attract us to things that we enjoy, and even help us to identify people from an early age. Because of our evolutionary dependency on scents, we are able to differentiate between thousands of smells. Although these natural uses of smells in the live environment suggest potential applications of scent in virtual environments (VEs), the most powerful applications of scent may lie in eliciting targeted emotional states or modify other user states to prepare them for educational or entertainment experiences.