Smellovision?

Do NOT play Lucky's Tail!

Smellovision is too hard a problem it will never fly. We will get direct neuron stimulation first.

I don't think it's as much of a technical issue as it is a practicality issue. You could probably keep 50-100 small vials of aromatic chemicals in a reasonably small area, and then you could just have an SDK that allows the programmer to determine the amounts that each chemical gets released with triggers in the game. The problem is it requires game devs to hire frangrance chemists to be able to know what to combine to synthesize a given scent, and it requires the player to either insert something in their nose or stay close to a frangrance sprayer for it to work. With many people already being hesitant to use HMDs because they don't look cool, I don't see this as an easy sell. Also I'm not sure you want to give game devs that much control over how your room smells.

They had something like this at GDC a few years back (Game Skunk). It was pretty limited, though, to something like 5 or 6 different scent cartridges at a time. I guess it would work, in theory, but the current iteration did not seem very compelling. You can imagine some variation of this theme working, ideally if you could have a large bank of scents and not have to constantly be swapping them about.

"Twitchmonkey" wrote:
I don't think it's as much of a technical issue as it is a practicality issue. You could probably keep 50-100 small vials of aromatic chemicals in a reasonably small area, and then you could just have an SDK that allows the programmer to determine the amounts that each chemical gets released with triggers in the game. The problem is it requires game devs to hire frangrance chemists to be able to know what to combine to synthesize a given scent, and it requires the player to either insert something in their nose or stay close to a frangrance sprayer for it to work. With many people already being hesitant to use HMDs because they don't look cool, I don't see this as an easy sell. Also I'm not sure you want to give game devs that much control over how your room smells.

You can do that but their is no primary palette of smells like there is with colour, virtually every smell would require its own cartridge. Also oderants are sticky, scent dispensers tend to end up smelling like a mixture of all the scents they have produced in the past.

I could see someone creating a game that releases hormonal fragrances. Calm, rage, love.
Maybe a VR version of 'Who farted' hahaha
Now if someone made a 5D remake of Polyester the Movie, Id spend a dollar.

Cheers

J

there was a smellovision-device in germany, around 2001,2002 or 2003(?).
Never read more than a small ad text in a pc magazine