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 we're 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 GameSend, makers of GameSend, is hoping to answer with a recently
released GameSendSend system, which they claim automatically translates on-screen action into a
number of scents. That number being six, and those scents being forest, gunfire, storm, explosion,
racing cars, and a neutral 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 pandemic?
Well, let's look at the history of smellable media and see if past is prologue.
A few theaters and cinemas experimented with adding scents 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 ventilation
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
Mamma Mia in the theater and it still smelled like the Fast and the Furious in there.
Or you get home and your wife demands to know why you smell like Mulan Rouge. 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 scents was Walt Disney as part of 1940's Fantasia, though this was dropped due to expense.
Perhaps the most famous of these early experiments was Smelovision, originally called Centovision,
which was demonstrated at the 1939 World Fair. Smelovision 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. Smelovision 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 to $300 in real terms.
The original Smelovision only wound up in one movie, 1960's 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, but more of a distraction than an integrated part of the experience.
You can also still experience something like Smelovision 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 Smelable 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 VRSense system developer kit that was
covered by our sister channel Linus 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 Smelovision, 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
Smelable Media than mid-century cinema? Let's take that basic smelly idea and apply it to video
games. Can products like Gamecent actually overcome the pitfalls we've discussed? Can Smelovision
perhaps gain a toehold NVIDIA games where it's been unsuccessful in television? The baseline bar
that a modern Smelable Media needs to surpass is technical confidence 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
nearby tripod. You could also probably use a mask of some kind to pump the scent directly into your
face holes, but 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. Gamecent, 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 scents accordingly. Finally, AI to the rescue.
Due to the tendency for scents to linger, because there are literally molecules hanging in the air
and going up your nose, video game scents would probably work best as a subtle,
ambient background smell like grass when you're standing in a virtual meadow.
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. NVIDIA 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 Gamecent and predecessor Asylia. 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 constituency of Resident Evil players who want
to smell rotten flesh and sewage when they're fighting a zombie in an alleyway. Turn that crap down.
But probably the biggest hurdle is simply economic viability. It's worth mentioning that
several large VR experiences at places like theme parks have had olfactory effects as far
back as the 1990s. It's just that those effects haven't been able to make the same jump to viable
at-home use as VR headsets. Now, we all know that many gamers are very willing to spend a lot of
dosh 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, it's just going to be a stinky paper
weed. It's also hard to see the ability to smell a game being a better immersion game 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's an argument to be made that smell-o-vision, 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 creative 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 liked 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.