Sensory Immersion

According to Euromonitor, 29% of the global digital consumers report using a beauty app for a virtual makeover or product trial before purchase. And a growing comfort with Web3 is increasing consumer appetite for sensory shopping with early signs of consumers hungry for more immersive shopping experiences in the multi-sensory era of e-commerce. As projected by Euromonitor, a 42% growth is expected in online beauty and personal care sales, from 2021 to 2026.

Euromonitor concludes that in 2023 and beyond, consumers will demand even more immersive online shopping experiences, other tech advances will make multisensory e-commerce a tangible reality, more mass market brands will embrace sensory shopping and brands will begin to integrate sensory immersion into their metaverse platforms.

For instance, digitizing scent is a complicated process, but smell tech is making significant progress that could affect industries including food, retail, healthcare, and more in the coming year. While light and sound can easily be measured with sensors and mechanically replicated to create a predictable sensory experience, odors are much harder to decode as they’re based on a complex interaction between molecules and smell receptors. Further, many seemingly distinct aromas — like baking bread or freshlybrewed coffee — emerge from hundreds of different molecules being detected in tandem. People can also react to the same set of molecules differently, so even agreeing on what an odor should smell like is complicated.

Despite these challenges, digitizing smell would offer lots of benefits. For example, being able to accurately measure, analyze, and predict odors could lead to better detectors for disease, explosives, or food ripeness. Food and beauty companies could use smell prediction to experiment faster and more cheaply by identifying potential products that consumers would actually enjoy. Meanwhile, being able to accurately digitally encode and recreate a smell would offer a new dimension to immersive experiences, like those being built for the metaverse. Now, after years of toil, smell tech is making progress. Startup activity is ramping up, and researchers are announcing notable advances in understanding smell. As in other fields of innovation, one big driver has been powerful AI tools.