Why the Sense of Smell?
OWidgets (Olfactory Widgets) allows you to explore the potential of smell to augment your content, service, or product to create novel customer experiences.
Our Services

Scent Design

Scent Hardware
New grant tackles the loss of smell and its impact on our wellbeing
SmellHealth
Digital smell healthcare applications
The aim of this ERC PoC is to enable the design of new digital smell healthcare applications (e.g. smell training) through the development of a highly accurate, efficient, adaptive, and affordable smell-delivery technology (hardware and software components), and demonstrate its use to healthcare professionals. The human sense of smell is powerful, it makes an important and yet often undervalued contribution to our life and wellbeing with a unique link to emotions and memories. Smell dysfunctions or loss (even temporary) give rise to a range of problems, which can affect personal safety, enjoyment of food, personal hygiene, and can cause serious mental health disorders, including depression, anxiety and social isolation. In Europe and the USA, around 20% of the general adult population has some form of smell dysfunction and this number rises to 75% for people aged between 70–80 years.

Our Projects

Tree VR
At exhibitions the Tree experience makes use of multisensory elements to enhance the immersion factor. OWidgets has helped New Reality Co. to upgrade and automate their scent delivery, increasing the impact and reliability of their experience. We have been working with Tree since 2018 and have presented with them at notable events such as the World Economic Forum in Davos (2019 & 2020), the World Government Summit (2019), and at long-term installations in Singapore and New York.
The fully automated OWidgets scent-delivery system took our Tree experience to another level, no need for dedicated assistants to administer the smell! The quality and the accuracy of the delivery is incredible!
Fly VR
OWidgets supported the creation of Fly through the design and implementation of the multisensory components. We lead the scent design from story-board to final setup, helping select scents that would drive key parts of the narrative, and liasing with scent producers to tweak to perfection. Synchronising skin-feedback such as radiant heat and cool wind with the scent and storytelling elements of the virtual reality completed the sensory immersion.

The Team

Emanuela Maggioni
CEO & Co-Founder
Over 8 years of experience in consultancy related to smell, including Unilever, Benetton, IFF, with a PhD in smell perception and emotions.
Florin Udrea
Chairman
Over 20 years experience in power devices, high voltage and smart technologies, micro-sensors and MEMS. He is a Professor of Semiconductor Engineering.
Richard Hooper
Hardware Engineer
Over 8 years of experience working as hardware development engineer in various companies and universities.
Marianna Obrist
Scientific Lead & Co-Founder
Over 15 years experience in human-computer interaction and user experience design and research. She is a professor of multisensory experiences.Applications for Smell

Virtual Reality
We have explored creating immersive virtual realities enhanced through the sense of smell, taking advantage of directional scent and the close links between scents and memories.
Notifications
Visual notifications can be very distracting. We studied the use of scents for chat notifications, conveying information about who sent the message and how urgent it is.