OmniScent: An Omnidirectional Olfaction-Enhanced Virtual Reality 360° Video Delivery Solution for Increasing Viewer Quality of Experience

The introduction of multiple sensorial effects to improve viewer multimedia experiences has resulted in the novel field coined mulsemedia. Virtual Reality (VR) is one of the recent enabling technologies for mulsemedia distribution and solutions can be enhanced to include scent dispensers, haptic devices and other equipment, for creation of immersive user experiences. In the past, a number of research works and real-life implementations have integrated smells and visual media. However, the scents are generated from a single location around a user, which can be inaccurate in the case of 360° VR experiences. This paper presents the architecture, principle, implementation and a feasibility study for OmniScent, an omnidirectional olfaction-enhanced VR 360° video delivery solution. The approach integrates four olfaction devices placed around a user, integrated with 360° videos. Scents are released during the video playout in the same direction the related objects appear in the video (e.g., front, back, left or right). An omnidirectional olfaction-enhanced video player was implemented using the WebXR technology, allowing the videos to be seen on both Web browsers and VR headsets. User testing demonstrated that over 70% of experiment participants noticed that the diverse scents, including apple and spices, were presented from multiple directions. Performance tests in terms of Round Trip Time (RTT) and resource consumption indicate that the solution performs well in commercial PC setups.