Making Scent Tangible in Virtual Reality

The impossibility of describing scent

Scents are abstract sensory impressions. Often there are no names at all for certain notes. People fall back on descriptions like “fresh” or “exotic.” What language can’t capture, images sometimes can. But for many scents, even that doesn’t help: How can a photo of a freshly cut slice of wood show the differences between cedarwood, rosewood, spruce, pine, or sandalwood? Someone who works in the timber trade might still grasp these differences, but photos of amber, oakmoss, or tonka beans give no one a real idea of the scent.

Symrise, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of fragrances and flavors, faces this challenge too. The company produces well-known perfumes and fragrances for detergents and cosmetics. When launching a new product, it is usually no longer enough to simply invite customers to take a sniff. The scent experience should be accompanied by visuals and sound.

That is why Symrise was looking for a new digital medium that could depict abstract worlds of scent and visualize fragrance. A fragrance consists of several components. On the one hand, there are the fragrance ingredients, whose origins or effects often come with fascinating stories. On the other, there are unique fragrance technologies, for example for combating malodors. Virtual reality makes it possible to visualize all these components vividly and take users on a journey into the world of scent.

Creating the right atmosphere

So Symrise commissioned us to produce a VR simulation of its scents. But what can VR do that other media can’t?

We selected four scents: “Citrus,” “Lavender,” “Rainforest,” and “Ocean Fresh.” Each scent is presented in its own room. Every room is designed individually. Colors, decorative elements, and sounds create an atmosphere that best represents each scent. You literally immerse yourself in the scent. Instead of illustrating a topic, we created an overall atmosphere, so you can experience immersively what cannot otherwise be depicted.

We encounter the scents presented in this application every day. So we animated a bathroom as a connecting element. In it, the scents are shown in color. Activating one of the scent clouds starts a journey “into the scent.” You enter the decorated mood room. There you also learn about the composition, production, and chemical technologies behind the fragrance ingredients.

For “Ocean Fresh,” we also headed out into nature. That’s because there is no single, clear scent that captures this idea. The ocean smells a little different to everyone. Perfumer Marc vom Ende created this fragrance at Symrise. We went to the beach with him. He showed us what inspires him when he creates a fragrance. For him, “Ocean Fresh” is made up of many components: the salt in the water, the smell of seaweed, the softness of the clouds, the feel of the sand, the wind on your face … Much of this can’t be smelled directly, but you can perceive it as an overall composition. Marc vom Ende takes these impressions back to his lab to turn them into fragrances.

360° documentary

Many ingredients for the fragrances are grown around the world. Symrise places great emphasis on sustainability and fair trade, including for bergamot. This citrus plant is grown in Calabria, in the far south of Italy. We traveled there to film the harvest and processing in 360°. There are worse places to shoot ;)

In this part of the presentation, we stand in the Italian farmers’ plantations and watch as each fruit is picked by hand and placed in a basket. The fruit then goes to the factory, where the oils are obtained with a special extraction process. To show what happens inside the machines in the 360° videos, we placed buttons at many points in the video. Activating them lets you see in detail what is going on.

The foundation for mixed reality

With the VR visualization project successfully completed, the next stage of development is coming up: bringing real scent into the headset. The first scent masks for VR headsets that make this possible already exist. The next steps have already been planned with Symrise. But we will report on them here once they have been officially presented.