Nov 2024
Sentverse
Sentverse is a wearable olfactory communication system for capturing, sending, and receiving scent across distance. It combines a face-worn device with a companion app so users can record odors from real environments, share them with others, and replay them through low-power olfactory stimulation.
Why Scent
What remote communication still cannot send is smell. People can describe a room, a flower, or a meal, yet the scent itself cannot travel with the message. Sentverse was designed around that missing sensory channel.
The gap matters because smell is closely tied to atmosphere, recollection, and emotional response. A transmitted scent can work not only as information, but also as memory, mood, and social presence in a way that text or photos cannot fully replace.
Research for Sentverse included 45 survey responses, 4 semi-structured interviews, and a 132-card affinity map. The interviews brought in two neurology and medical perspectives, one engineering perspective, and one media perspective. Together they pointed to three recurring requirements: the experience had to feel meaningful in communication, the wearable had to stay compact and comfortable on the face, and any stimulation method had to prioritize safety and perceptual clarity.
Research synthesis. Interview and survey insights were clustered into product requirements, opportunities, and technical constraints.
Olfactory Perception
Smell begins in the olfactory epithelium, where odor molecules interact with olfactory sensory neurons and trigger electrical activity. That signal travels through the olfactory bulb and forward into regions associated with memory and emotion.
This pathway is what makes olfaction so central to recall and affect. Rather than treating scent as decoration, Sentverse takes olfactory perception itself as the design focus and asks how a digital system could capture, transmit, and replay smell as a communicative experience.
User Journey
The user journey starts with a familiar problem. Someone notices a smell worth sharing, reaches for their phone, and finds that images and words can only gesture toward it. The key friction is not posting content, but the inability to send the sensory part of the experience itself.
System Design
Sentverse was structured as two linked parts: a wearable device and a mobile app. On the capture side, an odor source is sensed, translated into a digital record, and routed to the app through Bluetooth.
On playback, a selected scent file returns to the device, where the signal is converted into low-power electrical pulses delivered through nasal contact electrodes. Here, capture, transmission, playback, and perception are treated as one continuous system rather than separate features.
Wearable Device
The wearable was developed as a face-following form that could support odor capture, signal delivery, and comfortable contact in one structure. The design needed to stay lightweight on the face while making room for the scent sensor, detachable collection unit, battery, chip, Bluetooth control, and microcurrent release heads.
Sketch
Exploded View
Drink Sampling
Object Sampling
Device Detail
Integrated Experience
Together, the wearable and the app frame smell as a shareable medium rather than a private, local sensation. The system supports capturing a scent from an environment, sending it to another person, and receiving it back as an interactive olfactory experience.
The poster shows how the app works as the social and operational layer of the system. Explore browses a shared scent library, Upload records and publishes a new scent with context, Message sends scent files between people, Likes makes community response visible, and Connection pairs the wearable with the phone for playback and transfer.