Olfactory Stimuli in VR
2025 · Peer-reviewed · Yasmin Elsaddik
Overview
I've always been fascinated by how a single scent can shift your entire mood in seconds, so we set out to test whether that effect could be recreated inside a virtual environment.
Scent is the most underrated sense in immersive design.
What I studied
We ran a controlled experiment with 30 participants to test whether adding scent to a VR environment reduced stress more effectively than visuals alone. We measured physiological and self-reported stress responses across different sensory conditions inside an immersive virtual space.
What I found
Participants in the scent-enhanced VR condition showed meaningfully stronger stress reduction than those in the visual-only condition. It suggests that smell is the most powerful lever for making virtual environments feel genuinely calming.
This paper is published via IEEE and may require institutional access.
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