Sound Perfume

posted in: Research

Face-to-face communication remains the most powerful human interaction. In this day and age, people have become dependent on electronic devices to communicate with others leading to many interpersonal difficulties and miscommunications in today’s society. We believe that face-to-face communication remains the most powerful human interaction and these devices can never fully replace the intimacy and immediacy of people conversing in the same room. If society loses its physical aspect, many of the subtle benefits that go along with physical face-to-face contact will also be lost.

Much of communication is done non-verbally and emotions can easily be transferred from person to person without the utterance of a single word. Sound Perfume is our attempt to encourage face-to-face communication by making it more emotional and memorable. We do this by augmenting a person’s experience through additional auditory and olfactory stimuli during social encounters. We designed wearable actuators that provide each user the ability to handcraft their sound and scent identity.

This identity is then transferred to another system when two people meet, using a unique technique known as eye contact interaction, stimulating each person with their partners sound and smell preference. We have developed a working prototype designed in the shape of a pair of eyeglasses that help us demonstrate the interaction techniques and actuations. We also present an advanced design that is minimalistic in its use of components.