Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Do you want to SMELL your video games?”.
When you’re playing a video game, you want to feel immersed as much as possible. You want your character to feel like an extension of yourself. You want to see what they see hear, what they hear feel what they feel and when an enemy suddenly lunges out of nowhere. You want to let out just a little bit of pee, but isn’t there a sense where leaving out? Is it really enough that I can see here and feel Kratos? What, if I could also smell Kratos, taste him? Maybe not! That is exactly the kind of question that startup game. Send makers of game sent is hoping to answer with a recently released game sent scent system which they claim automatically translates onscreen action into a number of cents that number being six and those cents being Forest gunfire, storm explosion, racing cars and a neutal pallet cleanser they’ve.
Also got a few upcoming scents like ocean fresh cut grass sports arena and blood. The perfect combination of smells to simulate Mario Tennis, but is this the future of hyper immersive video games or just another Flash in the pan gimmick? Well, let’s look at the history of smellable media and see if past is prologue a few theaters and Cinemas experimented with adding sense to performances in the late 19th and early 20th century, it’s hard to know exactly what audiences thought of this back then they didn’t have Rotten Tomatoes, so they just threw literal Rotten Tomatoes in smaller venues. They might use a cloth soaked with scented oil and a fan to waft the desired smell across the audience, but in larger venues they typically just pumped perfume in through the ventil ation system or sprayed it down from the ceiling. Of course, this required a lot of perfume to pull off and the smell tended to linger, sometimes for days. Afterward, that’s a problem both because it’s potentially expensive and because it means that it’s hard to switch between scents without them winding up mixed and muddled piling up. On each other, just imagine if you went to see mamam Mia in the theater and it still smelled like the Fast and the Furious in there smells like family or you get home, and your wife demands to know why you smell like Mulan roue.
It was also easy for the film or play to have already moved on by the time the smell really hit you. It’S also notable that these experiments were mostly done by venue owners rather than filmmakers, meaning that the audience getting misted with perfume like a fancy vegetable, wasn’t necessarily the experience intended by the creator of the content. One of the first filmmakers known to have considered including sense, was Walt Disney as part of 1940s Fantasia, though this was dropped due to expense. Perhaps the most famous of these early experiments was smello Vision, originally called covision, which was demonstrated at the 1939 World. Fair smello Vision used a system of connected pipes which all fed to individual theater seats, thereby allowing the amount and timing of the scent to be tightly controlled by the projectionist smell Vision got a lot of excited press coverage, but the film industry they just weren’t interested In part, because it wasn’t cheap for a theater to install an estimated $ 25 to $ 30 per seat as of 1959 around 250 $ 50 to $ 300. In real terms, the original smell of vision only wound up in one movie 1960s scent of mystery, where the smells were designed to provide important hints about the film’s plot. Unfortunately, the film was a massive stinker, making back only 15 % of its budget also, while some of the smells were pretty accurate, others, weren’t and still others were accurate, but too revolting to really be desirable. Modern day, showings of scent of mystery typically use a system of scratch and sniff cards instead, Which is far cheaper.
More of a distraction than an integrated part of the experience. You can also still experience something like smell of vision at Select theaters, that offer 4dx experiences, which also involve haptic vibrations, wind, water, fog and occasionally bubbles. Various researchers and entrepreneurs have played with the idea of a home version of smellable media, but outside of scratch and sniff Concepts, it largely hasn’t been economically viable enough to even go to market. There was that one VR sense system developer kit that was covered by our sister Channel lus Tech tips, but it’s difficult to tell how much progress they’ve made towards an actual consumer product in the time since we covered it. But if smell Vision, the concept not the 20th century product has never ever worked on a broad scale. Why does anyone think it could work now? How are modern, video games a better choice for smellable media than mid-century Cinema? We’Ll tell you right after this refreshingly scented message from our sponsor delete me: here’s an issue, your personal info floating around online, without your say so totally not cool right delete me is here to save you from scammers blowing up your phone with Robo calls and sketchy Emails manually, removing all your accounts from the web is tedious, but delete me.
Software and expert Squad can wipe all that info out in a jiffy on average they’re removing over 2,000 pieces of data for customers in their first two years. That’S some serious cleanup! So if you’re, tired of your personal info playing hideand-seek online, go to join delet, me.com techwick and use code techwick for a sweet, 20 % off. Let’S take that basic smelly idea and apply it to video games.
Can products like gam scent actually overcome the pitfalls? We’Ve discussed can smell Vision, perhaps gain a to hold in video games where it’s been unsuccessful in television. The Baseline bar that a modern smellable medium needs to surpass is technical competence and ease of use. First, it needs to provide the player with a clear recognizable scent in sync, with the action on the screen.
This is pretty easily accomplished through a small module placed on your desk or a nearby tripod. You could also probably use a mask of of some kind to pump the scent directly into your face holes. That’S probably where we begin to see a clear trade-off in terms of comfort which might negate the immersion benefit. It’S very likely that similar to early VR, smelly, video games will only see limited consumer uptake and consequently limited developer. Support, which can be a self-reinforcing cycle. Gam scent, though, proposes getting around the need to have individual developers, add smell support by using Advanced AI, to Simply process, what’s happening in the game and generate appropriate sense accordingly.
Finally, AI to the rescue due to the tendency for sense to linger, because they’re literally molecules hanging in the air and going up your nose, video game sense would probably work best as a subtle ambient background smell like grass, when you’re standing in a virtual Meto. There might even be some value in playing a VR racing game and actually being able to smell fresh asphalt with a hint of burnt rubber. So long as it’s relatively subtle in a tight narrative experience like a good film like we talked about before it’s all cut relatively fast, with scenes, typically lasting at most a few minutes and jumping quickly between times and locations in video games. However, you’re, usually following the action in real time, allowing for a gradual transition between smells that feels more natural.
Another issue to overcome is simply the range of smells available in current video game systems, which includes both game scent and predecessor oselia. Unlike with color, there isn’t a small set of primary smells that can be combined to create every other smell. It doesn’t work like that. You’Re going to need more than six cents to capture the range of most gaming experiences plus, while our scent imitating abilities have definitely gotten more sophisticated since the 1960s there’s still a lot of stuff, we don’t know how to fake well smellable media done well also requires Easy customizability, because, while many players, probably don’t want to smell blood or gasoline, others would probably appreciate the viscerality of these. Arguably unpleasant smells still it’s pretty hard to imagine a large large constituency of Resident Evil players who want to smell rotten flesh and sewage when they’re fighting a zombie in Alleyway turn that crap down, but probably the biggest hurdle, is simply economic viability.
It’S worth mentioning that several large VR experiences that places like theme parks have had Al Factory effects as far back as the 1990s. It’S just that those effects haven’t been able to make the same jump to viable atome use as VR headsets. Now we all know that many gamers are very willing to spend a lot of do on fancy Niche peripherals, but those peripherals still typically have to provide decent value for the money.
Likewise, scent cartridges will need to be relatively long, lasting and relatively cheap to replace or once this thing loses its novelty just going to be a stinky paper weight. It’S also hard to see the ability to smell a game being a better immersion gain than the addition of a VR helmet. So it’s very likely to lag far behind VR in adoption, even after if it starts to gain traction still, there is an argument to be made that television for all that it’s been a punchline for the last 80 years, was just a good idea before its time. Even the latest iteration game sense is limited in that it’s a third party trying its best to procedurally match sense to a scene made by other creators. Just like those theater owners we mentioned before in an Ideal World, there would be a standard toolbox of sense that creators could work with to craft a scented experience that matches their create a vision for the content, regardless of which smelly box does the stinking, though, if Youtube supported it. I’D probably turn off autoplay. So thanks for watching guys, if you like this video hit like hit, subscribe and hit up our other video, where we discuss pneumatic tubes, the history of those and why we don’t really use them that widely, but they’re cool .