Sound Perfume: Designing a wearable sound and fragrance media for face-to-face interpersonal interaction

Abstract

Sound and smell can sometimes generate stronger emotional feelings than words can. They can even sometimes awaken strong, long forgotten memories. The Sound Perfume system provides users with additional auditory and olfactory sensory inputs through a pair of glasses, to augment their unique identities and impressions to others during face-to-face interpersonal communication. When a user starts a conversation with another person for the first time, sound and fragrance IDs information is shared with each other through wireless mobile communication. Received IDs information is forwarded to the user's glasses, and they can feel the other person's sound and fragrance IDs through actuators in the glasses. Perfume actuators heat the solid perfume and pulsating sound ID from the speaker helps to gently emit a fragrance. When the user meets the other person again in the future, their phone recognizes the other person and transfers ID information to their glasses to regenerate the other person's sound and fragrance IDs once again. This indirect stimulation helps users to express their unique identity during face-to-face interpersonal interactions, and awaken memories of the other person when they meet again after some time. Sound Perfume can also be integrated with a mobile phone camera and photo viewer application. When a user takes the other person's picture using a mobile phone camera, this photo saves a shot location, time, the other person's name, the other person's mobile phone MAC address, and the other person's sound and fragrance ID information. When he sees this picture later, he can feel the other person's sound and fragrance IDs softly through his glasses again. In this paper, as the first step, we are more focusing on the designing of the Sound Perfume system. Copyright 2011 ACM.