Nature Communications (May 2024)

Intelligent wearable olfactory interface for latency-free mixed reality and fast olfactory enhancement

  • Yiming Liu,
  • Shengxin Jia,
  • Chun Ki Yiu,
  • Wooyoung Park,
  • Zhenlin Chen,
  • Jin Nan,
  • Xingcan Huang,
  • Hongting Chen,
  • Wenyang Li,
  • Yuyu Gao,
  • Weike Song,
  • Tomoyuki Yokota,
  • Takao Someya,
  • Zhao Zhao,
  • Yuhang Li,
  • Xinge Yu

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-48884-z
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 15, no. 1
pp. 1 – 15

Abstract

Read online

Abstract Olfaction feedback systems could be utilized to stimulate human emotion, increase alertness, provide clinical therapy, and establish immersive virtual environments. Currently, the reported olfaction feedback technologies still face a host of formidable challenges, including human perceivable delay in odor manipulation, unwieldy dimensions, and limited number of odor supplies. Herein, we report a general strategy to solve these problems, which associates with a wearable, high-performance olfactory interface based on miniaturized odor generators (OGs) with advanced artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms. The OGs serve as the core technology of the intelligent olfactory interface, which exhibit milestone advances in millisecond-level response time, milliwatt-scale power consumption, and the miniaturized size. Empowered by robust AI algorithms, the olfactory interface shows its great potentials in latency-free mixed reality (MR) and fast olfaction enhancement, thereby establishing a bridge between electronics and users for broad applications ranging from entertainment, to education, to medical treatment, and to human machine interfaces.