Hands-on with Scentient: feel the perfume of VR!

At United XR Europe last year, I had the occasion to try the scent emitter device by Scentient again. Today (with a bit of delay), I’m very happy to tell you about it.

Scentient

Scentient is a startup that aims to give people that sense of smell in an XR experience.

The sense of smell is one of the most ancient and most powerful ones, but we are still in very early stages in emulating it in immersive realities. Apart from some weird experimentations using electrical charges, usually the emulation happens with cartridges with pre-computed scents, which are then sprayed towards the nose of the user.

Escents by Scentient works exactly this way. It is a device you wear on your neck, and that connects wirelessly to your VR device (e.g., Quest or Pico standalone headset). The device has 6 slots, each one of which contains one cartridge of a different scent. Remember that scents are not like colors, and we can’t emulate all of them starting from just 3-4 components (there is no R, G, B of smell), so you must have a cartridge for every specific scent you want to feel (e.g., chocolate, flowers, etc…). When inside the VR experience, it comes the time that you have to feel a specific scent, that scent is vaporized and blown towards your nose. This way, you can feel a virtual reality that is not visual and auditory, but also olfactory.

The company claims that their device is ergonomic and is able to provide very immersive sensations, also thanks to the fact that it can change the scent to feel very quickly. But is it true? Well, keep reading for my hands-on impressions!

Hands-on Scentient’s Escents

My most attentive readers may remember that this is not the first time that I have talked about Scentient on this blog. I also mentioned it in this article from one year ago, where I reported about my hands-on impressions from AWE EU 24. This second hands-on session was good for me not only to evaluate the device per se, but also how it has evolved over time.

The collar around the neck has evolved a lot over the past year, and now it looks much more refined. Now it feels like a product, and it also comes in a handy case. So, first of all, it’s good to see that Scentient has improved its product.

The choice of having a collar and not a device that is attached directly to the headset has both pros and cons. The biggest pro is about ergonomics: a device attached to the headset makes it more front-heavy, while wearing something around your neck is pretty comfortable, because the shoulders are able to carry a lot of weight. The Escents device is not heavy, and it is easy to put on and take off. Being an independent device around the neck, it can also be bulky and contain bigger cartridges, something that a worn device can not offer. The biggest disadvantage is that this way the device is more distant from the nose, and this makes it more complex to provide proper scent emulation. In fact, since the device is more distant, the scent particles need more time to reach the nose (causing a delay), and the scent should also be stronger to be properly felt. Furthermore, this form factor means that the users have to wear a second device beyond the headset, and in some contexts (like public demos), this may be a nuisance.

The demo provided was still a very simple tech demo, like one year ago. It was a modification of the samples of the Unity Interaction Toolkit, with some elements that you could grab to feel the smell. This was a bit of a turndown to me: after one year, I expected something a bit better… There are so many cheap environments that can be bought on the Unity Asset Store to assemble a visually nice demo, that I wonder why they never did that. As a tech guy, I can stand a tech demo myself, but I’m afraid that other people in the expo may have appreciated this product less because of this.

During the demo, I could try the six fragrances that are provided with the first batch of devices: jasmine, chocolate, green fig, pine, burnt wood, and petrol. Chocolate was definitely my favorite (well, this shouldn’t surprise you… I love sweeties!), while petrol was the least pleasant one (I don’t even know why they chose petrol for the demos…). In general, the fragrances were fine, and I could clearly understand what they were emulating. But they suffered from the same problem I’ve always mentioned when I have reviewed this kind of device: they felt a bit “chemical”. For instance, the chocolate didn’t feel like real chocolate, but like a chemically-synthesized chocolate. It is still good to increase the sense of presence; it still makes you hungry, but you can feel that it is not real chocolate.

The scent emission was accompanied by a little breeze that brought the scent particles to my nose. Depending on the context of the experience, this may be a good thing or not. If you are feeling the perfume of flowers near the sea, some air blown on your face may feel good. If you are emulating to be at home drinking chocolate from a cup, this is less ideal. The breeze was not strong, and it was not accompanied by any noise, so it was not a big deal, but I could clearly perceive it on my face. As I’ve told you, having the device distant from the nose brings some disadvantages. And to bring the scent fast to the nose, the device tries to blow it fast, hence the “breeze” effect.

The claims of the company to have a quick emission of scents are true: when I put the controller close to my face, I could feel the smell of the virtual object I was holding pretty quickly. And so is the claim of scent switching. Going from one scent to another after a few seconds worked quite well. I would say that the device has improved a lot compared to the past in terms of these two aspects. I remember when I tried the device in 2024, that after a while in the experience, I had my nose completely saturated with the scents. Even my clothes still smelled from the experience I tried! This time, instead, I did not get the same effect: I could go from one scent station to the next and feel the correct smell, without having the air around me completely saturated with scents. The only exception to this happened when I tried the smoke scent: it was very strong, so it filled my nose, and it took me a few seconds before I could feel the next scent, which was the pine. Apart from that, I saw a great improvement regarding the ability to feel different scents without saturating the nose too much.

Price and availability

Escents is available for preorder on Scentient’s website for £999. The device comes together with six cartridges of perfume and is expected to ship in Q1 2026.

Final impressions

In general, I came out with a good impression from my test with Escents. The device has evolved a lot in the past months, and it is now a product ready to ship. My experience during the demo was good, and I think Escents can help in making some immersive experiences more realistic. Anyway, you have to keep in mind that scent emulation is still at the beginning, and so it still comes with various problems, like the fact that the scents don’t feel exactly realistic or that they can saturate the nose of the users. But for some short VR experiences in some dedicated fields, like healthcare or marketing installations, this device can do its job pretty well.

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