What the Nose Knows

Story by Kaitie Catania

Freshly mowed grass. Warm white toast. Crumpled up wrapping paper that’s been ripped off a gift. The return of old clothes stored away for the season. Whether or not these smells elicit a reaction from you, chances are you’ve experienced that quick waft of something so specific that it triggers a memory or emotion, or even brings you back to a place from your past.

For the narrator in French author Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913), it was a tea-soaked madeleine cake that sparked such a sensory overload, earning the phenomenon its nickname “the Proust effect.” For Sarah Socia ’17, vice president of scentware at Burlington-based OVR Technology, it’s not a madeleine cake, but a deep breath of crisp, fall morning air that takes her mind to a place of calm and comfort.

And it’s likely a sensation she’s already bottled up for others to smell and experience, no matter where they are. She’s contributing to a new Proustian-like form of virtual reality (VR) that targets mental health and wellness through the power of the olfactory system—responsible for scent—that’s where the “O” in “OVR” comes from.

“Without overextending the science here, in layman’s terms, smell does have a very powerful effect on memory and emotion. The sense of smell is the only sense directly connected to the limbic system, which means it has a direct neural pathway to the parts of the brain involved in memory, behavior, and emotion,” she explains.

OVR Technology combines hardware, software, and scentware to create fully immersive, relaxing virtual environments based in nature—a forest or a campsite, for example—that users can physically navigate and interact with. Using a device they developed, the ION, that attaches to VR headsets and houses scents in refillable chambers, up to nine different scents can be incorporated into OVR Technology’s virtual worlds.

“We have certain capabilities for interaction with different objects,” Socia says. “In our demo vignette, people are pretty amazed when they're able to pick a rose, bring it to their nose and smell it. At the bottom of the rose, there are roots and you can actually smell dirt.”

Their software places digital borders around objects in the virtual world both stationery and moveable, which inform the ION what scent to release and how much as the user moves about their surroundings. “At a campfire, for example, there’s an invisible geometry around the virtual campfire that makes it so that as you get closer to it, you actually smell it more—and as you get further away, you'll smell less,” Socia says.

OVR Technology is changing the way we experience virtual reality with cutting-edge scent technology. Getting those scents as close to real as possible sometimes requires getting VP of Scentware Sarah Socia '17 out of the lab and into the real world. Here, she and a colleague travel to Mount Mansfield to sniff out the aroma of fern that will be used in combination with other scents like campfire, pine, and leaf to enhance a virtual campsite. The ION device from OVR Technology is designed to fit any head-mounted VR display on the market, attaching an interchangeable cartridge to the headset that houses up to nine unique scents at a time.

OVR Technology creates complex scent environments in the virtual world by mapping out invisible scent geometries using their software plugin. Left, the blue lines depict the scent geometries, directing the scent of smoke to waft from the box of matches in the virtual world, while the bouquet of flowers emits the smell of roses in a static cone shape around the flowers.

Right, a demo avatar introduces users to virtual worlds created by OVR Technology and guides them through vignettes that prompt users to engage with their surroundings by picking a rose, assembling a pizza, or roasting a marshmallow, for example, while experiencing tasks’ associated smells.

Though she can’t reveal precisely how she sources and creates these realistic scents, she can say that they’re water—rather than alcohol—based solutions, which is how perfumes are made. The alcohol can be irritating and water helps with aerosolization. “Since our device creates microbursts of scent, your breath naturally clears away the smell. So, the scent appears and dissipates very quickly, which is what our device does very well.”

Aside from the obvious distinction between OVR and traditional VR experiences, the other major differences are its intent and availability. While traditional, commercially available VR headsets and experiences are largely designed for entertainment, OVR Technology was born in part to address a growing demand for cognitive therapies and stress management. The brainchild of a team of scientists, olfactory evangelists, engineers, and entrepreneurs—Aaron Wisniewski, Matt Flego, Sam Wisniewski, Erik Cooper, and Dave Stiller—guests of their OVR worlds tend to be individuals in need of a powerful tool to support mental health and well-being, usually in consultation with practitioners or researchers.

Though its primary purpose is overall wellness, OVR Technology has also been used in training and simulation for the military as well as for climate change education—which is a lot different than, say, a peaceful picnic by a babbling brook. When Socia designs scents for virtual environments, it’s critical she knows the desired outcomes, content, physical space, and context of how the client will use it.

“For example, smoke can elicit a certain feeling and is really dependent on the environment a person is in. The smell of smoke in a campfire would be very different from the smell of smoke in a building,” she explains.

“It's very personal and subjective, and there are a lot of context clues that go into it. It's really about figuring out what smells would naturally be in the environment, and then just trying to add a layer of authenticity by adding in scents that may stand out for a particular reason, or that add to the level of what is called ‘presence and immersion’ in virtual reality."

And when that level of authenticity is achieved in intentional, natural environments, the product really does make a difference on mood and anxiety. In fact, a study by the UVM Medical Center builds on previous research affirming VR’s effectiveness as a “distraction for pain and medical procedures, relaxation and calming, and immersion therapy for trauma, PTSD and phobias” by testing it in a clinical psychiatry setting.

Led by integrative health expert and clinical psychologist and psychotherapist at the medical center David Tomasi, the study offered weekly OVR sessions to voluntary participants of an inpatient psychiatry unit, in addition to their standard clinical care. Published by the Journal of Medical Research and Health Sciences, the study required Socia and the team to develop a relaxing virtual forest and campsite that patients could visit in eight- to twelve-minute sessions each week. The virtual environment came complete with a virtual tent, picnic table, fire pit, logs, and aromas of fresh bacon and toasted marshmallows.

“The OVR environment is an immersive, three dimensional, 6 DoF (Six Degrees of Freedom) environment in which the subject can freely move and interact with the virtual items presented therein,” the study explains.

Tomasi’s patients reported immediate and significant improvements to their anxiety, stress, and pain levels that lasted up to three hours after a session. In fact, when asked to rate their anxiety levels on a scale of one to ten—with one being the lowest and ten the highest—half of participants rated their levels as

either a two or three at the end of their sessions. In all, participants’ anxiety dropped a median of five levels after visiting the virtual forest.

“OVR allowed patients whose circumstances excluded them from physical activity and exposure to nature, to virtually experience physical activity in nature with similar sounds, sights, and smells to a real-world scenario,” Tomasi says. “Those similar sensations evoked memories and responses that reduced anxiety and improved mood, just as the real experience would.”

While the study was years in the making, it reflects data collected over a four-month span between September and December 2020, a critical point in the COVID-19 pandemic. The timing certainly was not ideal, Tomasi says, but the unlikely circumstance brought new understanding to the potential for OVR within the context of forced social isolation.

“The added COVID-19 restrictions, on top of an already very limiting situation for many individuals suffering with mental health disorders, presented a very difficult challenge to the research,” he says. “However, we can say that precisely because of this situation, we were able to see how important this approach is to help mental health in general.”

Ultimately, Tomasi hopes to explore how OVR might be effective or retooled to aid those with mobility constraints or other physical disabilities with stress, anxiety, or other mood disorder symptoms.

So, how exactly does one become a vice president of scentware at an olfactory virtual realty company? “To be completely honest, I didn’t have a specific outcome in mind,” Socia says. For as unconventional as her job is, so too is the career path she took to it, first by entering UVM with a biological sciences major. “I ended up finding I was a lot more interested in the brain itself, how it functions, and how it’s part of our lives. I ended up quickly changing my major to neuroscience.”

It was in Professor Eugene Delay’s lab as a research assistant that she became familiar with chemoreception sciences—the way we understand the chemical world, including by smell and taste— while exploring how a chemotherapy drug affects the taste system. “Olfaction is actually around 90 percent of what you perceive as flavor,” she says of the close connection between taste and smell.

After UVM, she spent some time on the taste side of things, immersed in the Burlington restaurant scene as a sous chef when she first crossed paths with the self-proclaimed “olfactory evangelist” Aaron Wisniewski, with whom she helped make cocktail aromatics, beverage elixirs and mists by the likes of chocolate cake, English cucumber, bonfire smoke, and even tomato at his other olfactory-based business, Alice and the Magician.

“Everyone will always feel a certain way towards a smell and associate it with something,” she says. Take Tide, for example. “Tide wasn't originally scented, but then they ended up rebranding it with scent in mind. Now when people smell Tide, they think clean and start associating that smell with something that's clean.”

And while OVR might not be something consumers can buy off the shelf as easily as Tide today, Socia is hopeful that the adoption and proliferation of virtual reality will become more ubiquitous and applied in innovative ways in the near future.

“Personally, I find a lot of value in this work because it really is interdisciplinary. And with the emerging technologies, it's really exciting to work on these projects and be part of it in a way that taps into the mix of both art and science.” UVM

Back on Mount Mansfield, Socia and OVR Technology CEO Aaron Wisniewski are capturing wildflower aromas for a new scent they’re developing in the lab.

Use the camera on your phone or tablet to watch Socia’s smells being put to the test.