Transferring scents over a communication network

In our work on scent technology, we have come across technology that can be used, in a limited way, to achieve scent transfer. In this paper, we document the scent transfer demonstration that we constructed for a science fair in 2018.
Scent transfer requires a means to measure, transmit, classify, and reproduce scents. First, an ion-mobility spectrometer was used to measure scents. This data was sent to a server on the Internet. From the server, the measurement data was downloaded, baseline-corrected, and classified with an algorithm based on weighted K nearest neighbors and time series measurements. The classification result was used to instruct an olfactory display prototype to reproduce the scent for humans to sense. Our demonstration included two scents. Many more could be included, but a general-purpose scent reproduction is beyond our, and as far as we know, beyond anybody’s current capabilities. Image and audio transmission technology are mature, but in the chemical senses such as olfaction and taste, significant challenges remain before they can be routinely included in multimodal interfaces.