Portable Device for Touch, Taste and Smell Sensations in Augmented Reality Experiences

The purpose of this work is to present a portable hardware device that can provide touch, taste and smell sensations to an augmented reality experience. The proposed hardware is part of a mobile five senses augmented reality system for Museums, to improve and augment, as much as possible, the visiting of a museum, i.e., see, ear, touch, feel and experience all its interesting objects. The existing solutions related to the augment of sensing experiences consist of big hardware systems and they are far from being portable. In this work, a new small and portable device is presented, to integrate and connect with the user’s smartphone to provide the complete five-sense experience. The implemented device adds to the complete augmented system, the touch, smell and taste experiences. Moreover, the device is flexible enough to adapt itself to different sizes of the user’s smartphone or tablet. It is powered by a rechargeable battery, which gives the module the ability to keep the system running during the visit of the museum. The core unit is a microcontroller, it receives instructions from the mobile application in the user’s smartphone and acts accordingly, controlling the remaining hardware of the portable device to deliver the five-sense experience to the user. The communication between the device and the mobile application is possible through wireless communication, using a Bluetooth interface. The communication with the remaining module, denoted here as physical interfaces, will be wired. Preliminary results of device’s first prototype are also presented in this paper.