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
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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 NVIDIA
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 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 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