Will BO Make Your Avatar Feel More Real?

Virtual world problems

Mark Zuckerberg’s struggle to make virtual reality a thing is something to behold. Reality Labs, the division of Meta that Zuck is counting on to create the metaverse, lost $9.4 billion in 2022 alone. And yet the jazzy new tech is drawing yawns from the gamer community:

I can tell you what the metaverse is. It’s the internet in VR. Instead of scrolling through Amazon pages, you’ll roam virtual aisles, pick up products with simulated hands and encounter other shoppers along the way. Rather than work in a physical space, or from home with one eye on Slack/Microsoft Teams/GChat, you’ll inhabit virtual offices with virtual coworkers.

Does that not sound… a bit tedious? I think the reason that Meta’s VP of the metaverse, Vishal Shah, seemed to have such trouble putting the concept into concrete terms in the company’s Metaverse 101 series was because the metaverse in concrete terms sounds pretty dull. Far better to speak in messianic tones about the creator economy and the metaverse’s “experiential” possibilities than it is to tell everyone you’re turning their 9-to-5 into a drab version of Second Life.

It’s an article of faith among VR evangelists that the more “immersive” the experience, the more people will flock to it. Adding smell to the metaverse is a major goal and it’s no surprise that each year at CES startups pitch scent delivery systems for VR helmets. What is surprising is that academic scientists have jumped into the game.

A new paper by a pan-European research team is the first to look the effects of body odor and personal fragrance on the realism of VR avatars. It’s a rather complicated study that centers on the notion of “embodiment”.

Embodiment is the experience of perceiving a body or body part in VR as belonging to one’s own actual body. In some way it is Mark Zuckerberg’s dream for the metaverse. Researchers quantify the embodiment illusion by measuring skin conductance changes in the test subject. The more the subject mind-melds with the avatar body, the bigger the change in skin conductance when the avatar is threatened by a knife say, or a hypodermic needle.

The new study looked at how well certain smells enhance the embodiment illusion. Participants wore an Oculus headset modified with a scent pen positioned near the nose. It delivered male- or female-typical body odor, along with masculine or feminine cologne scents.

So far, so good. But here’s where it gets complicated. Participants (men and women) were given only an opposite-sex VR avatar, but were tested with both male and female BO, and male and female cologne.

[Wait, so it was a virtual trans experience?—Ed.] [Try and stay with me here, okay?]

The main result: BO that was sex-congruent to the avatar created a better embodiment illusion.

In other words, when test subject Johnnie Euro’s female avatar is threatened, he responds more when the avatar has female BO and less when its has male BO. (Jane Euro had the reverse pattern.)

Weirdly, the sex-specific commercial colognes didn’t have an effect on embodiment.

The research team offers a long song and dance but can’t really provide a compelling account for this mixed pattern of results. And in any event, it doesn’t address the billion dollar question: will BO enhance the experience of VR porn?

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Marte Roel Lesur, Yoann Stussi, Philippe Bertrand, Sylvain Delplanque and Bigna Lenggenhager. (2023). Different armpits under my new nose: Olfactory sex but not gender affects implicit measures of embodiment. Biological Psychology 176:108477.