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Adding an Olfactory Dimension To Games
cylonlover writes "California-based company Scent Sciences is looking to bring an olfactory dimension to computer games with its ScentScape personal digital scent delivery system. The ScentScape Gaming Suite system consists of a unit that plugs into a PC or gaming console via USB and generates smells using scent cartridges. As well as aiming for the development of ScentScape-capable games from games developers, the system also allows gamers to add scents to existing games and share these with other ScentScape system users."
But seriously folks, this is an awful, awful idea. If given a choice between sinking my money into this or into the Phantom console, I'd have to think a bit before making up my mind.
Want to make a game with an olfactory element? Go for it. Make the character someone/something with an enhanced sense of smell and display whatever their nose picks up as a visual overlay, or with an in game radar map. This has been done at least twice that I'm aware of, and works just fine, conceptually. Make it a core gameplay element and you could do something original even.
It also doesn't require either the player to use their very real nose to experience anything unpleasant, and doesn't require an expensive, useless, gimmicky peripheral.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
Great now we'll get
Tea and kung-fu. Life is good. Rising Phoenix
Everything will smell like ass...
Ok, some posting problems here. I meant to say: Great now we'll get: Grand Theft Auto: Detroit. Now with real hooker smell!
Tea and kung-fu. Life is good. Rising Phoenix
will be a nightmare to play. I would imagine zombies smell really really really bad.
Plenty of games stink already.
Really i can only think of a few real uses for this... And honestly i don't want to smell any of those things either.
I can't imagine this being pleasant for a game like Doom...
This is, like, a totally radical blast from the past. It was a blast from the past when the BBC brought back smellovision in '95, dudes and dudettes, and has been tried in one form or another since, like, a hundred years ago, man.
Also, using scent for video games would be totally bogus, since there's olfactory latency and stuff involved.
When will they come out with a fart app for it?
Now we now why Jobs didn't want anymore fart apps. It's one thing to hear farts, it's another to have to actually smell them.
Seems a little early for April Fools.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
I cannot imagine this taking off in any significant way. Can you imagine the sales person walking into ID Software and saying something like "What if gamers could smell Rage as well as see it? Huh? Huh? *Shrugs Eyebrows*
Really...
This would be great. Just go drop a virtual load in all the best camping spots. At least you know the person who gets you is really committed to winning
I have zero interest in this product. I don't want it. If it was on the market right now, and it worked perfectly, and it cost £1, I wouldn't buy it. If it was free, I wouldn't take it. It does not appeal to me in any way whatsoever.
Companies have been banging on about "smell-o-vision" for TV for years. I don't think anyone is interested in that either.
Scent cartridges? Jeez give me a break. As if anyone is going to waste money on smelly video games.
Why do I think that the most common refill will be "fart"?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
It's about time for another scratch and sniff manual!
This could take Leisure Suit Larry to a whole new level.
Got Code?
Jeez, I know it isn't the greatest of ideas but the hate here is incredible.
I can think of many many uses where people would like it and it all comes down to one thing: Immersion.
Gritty FPS shooter with the smell of cordite, ozone, napalm etc in the air? check
Racing games: What is that smell? Crap my engine is overheating! My brakes are shot!
Two non-idiotic examples right off the bat. Hell I could even see it being used in casual games as frail old grandma explores her a virtual Kew gardens and smells the roses.
This is the second or third time such a product has been announced. I can see it now, computer viruses that make the user sick!
Nothing like the smell of stale shit and fresh napalm in the morning.
I'm 70 years old and do this for all occasions, accidentally and on demand.Grand children think I'm a genius!
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
This has been tried several times, starting decades ago.
Even though the smell systems 'can' be very effective, they have always had the same flaw. They may have others, but there is always the same big one plaguing them. They don't have a way to clear out the air without annoying the subjects. In other words, in a very short time, they just stink!
Imagine if music players didn't end the previous musical note, the cacophony would quickly become unbearable. It's the same thing with these smell-o-vision gadgets. Sure there's a way around it, but who wants to wear a mask the whole time, or be in a freaking wind tunnel? Nobody, that's why they fail.
Come on designers! Freaking google the stupid ideas and realize why they failed so you can either fix the problems or not be stupid enough to repeat the same basic design F-Ups of the past!
How about Peripheral Vision? I'd like to be able to see NPC cars and bad guys out of the corner of my eye for a change.
But this game already stinks enough as it is... :P
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
And it was simply no fun.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.11/digiscent.html
We had this at a "cyber cafe" that I worked in toward the end of the '90s. There was a VR headset that allowed you to fly through different landscapes (i remember a musty smelling cave). This machine sat in the corner and collected dust.
Maybe when we get to the point where virtual worlds make us feel like we are actually standing somewhere different (and not just staring at the screen or wearing a headset), then we will need to tackle things like smell and touch. This will help our virtual world transcend that "uncanny valley".
For now, it's just not needed. It's a gimmick, and probably an expensive one. I'm not insisted it will never be needed, but just not now.
When we do finally need to need to tackle the "smelling" aspect of VR, my guess is that our immersion into the world will be so advanced compared to what we have now that it's being done by fooling our neurons, and not our eyes / ears / nose themselves. At that point, these devices will be moot, because we'll just be sending signals to the brain.
Panel three?!?!
http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20101220/
Because something that 2 girls one cup really was lacking was that added dimension.
I remember seeing something about such a device years ago in some documentary on TV.
I'd be more concerned about the Obligatory Sewer level! That and most RPG's are set in a time where you bathed maybe twice in your life. Once when you were born, and optionally once before they put you in the coffin... It's comicon all over again!
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Does this really have a market? I mean most hard-core gamers live in a basement room that smells like a dungeon anyway.
"Honey, are you playing Second life again?"
"No sweetheart"
"So why does it smell like semen and cat hair in here?"
yes, www.dotcomforwardslash.com is my real URL.
... porn :D
a Zombie creeps up from behind ... ...your character fails a Will throw .... ...o shit!
I'm sure going to put a few more points in perception next time.
-- Put crudely, the world is an extremely large problem instance. (Russel/Norvig Artificial Intelligence)
I guess that makes it a USB pongle ?!
1. Don't worry much. This is one of the ideas that's been popping up again and again since the early 90. And every time it went nowhere, precisely because the awful downsides are that obvious and nobody wants it.
But, as is the case with stupid ideas, just as you think you buried it at the crossroads with a stake through its chest, never to rise again, along comes an idiot investor and drops a drop of blood... err... a wad of cash, and it does rise again. I'm seriously starting to think there's some Dunning-Kruger explanation to it. There must be a sweet spot of ignorance and stupidity where one can look at such an idea that was possible actually for many years, just too stupid to sell to anyone, and genuinely think "well, nobody did it only because they're not THE UBER-GENIUS like me!"
2. And the problems are even bigger than just getting to smell the mandatory sewer levels, or have the olfactory realism in the more than one quest to search through shit in WoW, and so on. Off the top of my head:
- it's unreliable, if anything depends on it. With other senses, you can kinda depend that most players won't be temporarily blind or deaf. By comparison having cold that makes your nose useless, or an allergy, or just being a smoker, or whatever, is quite common.
- MAJOR lag. Unless you literally gas the room with that smell, it depends on air currents and such to propagate. You're not going to experience stepping into a meadow full of flowers in real time. You step into that room and... 2-3 minutes later you actually start to notice the smell from your computer's gizmo. At which point you're actually out of it.
- smells don't dissipate that readily. With, say, sound, when you stop playing it, it stopped. With smells, well, that's why you need kitchen fans and generally ventilation. If you just cooked something, the room will smell like it for a long time. Ditto for any smells such a gizmo would produce.
- strong smells tend to be unpleasant, no matter what they are. (Just remember the last time some lady stunk the whole bus of some perfume that in moderation might have been even pleasant.) Unless you actually also analyse the air continuously and/or actively filter the old smells out, just keeping dumping more of that in the air can accumulate and become nasty even if it's just smelling of flowers and strawberries.
- because of the above factors, it's actually more likely to produce an olfactory cacophony. An average hour of playing, say, City Of Heroes, sees me popping through the sewers, going through some park, flying over the smoke stacks of the factories in King's Row, etc. Since smells tend to stick around for a while, you'll end up with a mixture of all those that not only isn't realistic for any of those areas, it's unlikely to be a particularly pleasant mix no matter what the components are.
Having more than one gamer going at it in the house, will only make it even worse.
- smells tend to stick in clothes, carpets, etc, for a while. That's another reason why people turn on the fan, use filters and/or open the window when cooking, instead of just letting the whole house soak in it. Even without the obvious stuff like going to work smelling like shit after doing those WoW quests, it's one more factor to create an unwanted olfactory cacophony.
- allergies. I don't know of anyone who has an actual allergy to light, but real allergies to the chemicals that constitute any given smell, are actually not very uncommon.
Etc.
3. But yeah, that's even assuming that nobody would pull a realistic sewer level, nor a goatse/rickrolling to some clip of them doing a nasty fart, nor write some virus that makes such a device put out a continuous smell of shit at full power, etc. In practice, I'd expect such things to be more of a given than the exception. The same kind of idiot who posts a goatse link, now will likely do it with smell too.
But, oh well... as I was saying, I still wouldn't worry much. This will die a silent death like all the others before it, and likely the only inconvenience will be reading the exact same stupid idea in 2-3 years again, from yet another idiot who thinks he's so smart that he's the first to think that up.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Inquiring minds want to know.
You're a terrible player! Your score absolutely stinks!
[you start to hear a psssssssshhhhhhhh sound come from your console...]
A company called DigiScents had a product called iSmell, I saw it at GDC quite some years ago. It worked, it failed, give up.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You guys all have no imagination. Have you ever tried this? Can you not imagine it adding an interesting element to game play or other apps? Scent is the first of human senses, and is deeply tied in with memory. Also, you can think of it as a medium or a palette that can express both good and bad smells. When engineers first designed the monitor, everyone wasn't complaining that games would all have pictures of lemon party and goatse etc. Any game developer subjecting their customers to too many bad smells will have a game that doesn't smell.
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Imagine the following games with smell added:
Terminator (oil and electric)
Half Life (Creatures and chemicals)
Need for Speed (Oil and Gas)
Army of Two (Gun Powder and Burning wreckage)
And these are the tame games. I'm sure I could come up with some others that would smell worse. Have a good gaming session and no one would come to your house anymore or they would call the cops figuring you were burning the place down with your new maserratti.
Smellovision, just like the Bugs Bunny cartoon?
The problem with this is really simple. You will need to replace the chemicals in this that produce the scents every so often. The other problem is that it will only be able to provide the scents that it has the chemicals for. Of course, I could see game companies including a scent disk with the game and then selling replacement scent disks for close to the same cost as the new game.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I remember games having this back in the DOS days. Leather Goddesses of Phobos had that scratch and sniff pad that came in the packaging if I remember right. Also putting this in to some kind of a device would make companies like HP salivate. They're making a killing from printer cartridges already and now the possibility of scent cartridges? They'd be all over that I bet.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
With visuals, we build everything out of red, green, and blue. With sound, we vibrate speaker cones to get a variety of sounds. Do such basic building blocks exist for smell? Are there base smells which can mix to make a wide variety of smells or will each game be limited to the scents the game-specific carts? Without a universal system in place for smells, I don't see smell ever being a major component in gaming.
it doesn't replicate the scent of other gamers. Two words, folks: soap, sunlight.
Have you actually RTFA? Because the gizmo there _isn't_ attached to the face, and is a verbatim repeat of everything that was wrong and stupid with the ones that failed, including basically all the factors I've listed, from lag to being unable to get rid of the previously produced smells.
So, sorry, my assessment that it's yet another idiot who thinks he's the first to do the same stupidity, is still very much true. Or to quote everyone's favourite wisecracker, Bejamin Franklin, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."
Yes, maybe someone else can do it right, but these particular ass-clowns aren't it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The Leather Goddesses of Phobos ?
It came with a scratch 'n sniff card that was covered with various stinks (you smell , it stinks ,) that you would be directed to scratch over and get a waft of at various points in the game.
What a bunch of idiots we all were.
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It was Infocom.
Hey what do you want?
It was back in 1986. My memory isn't perfect.
Remember all those terrible Leisure Suit Larry games?
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
That's what i want a peripheral that makes my house smell imagine a first person shooter like call of duty on that have your house smell like gunpowder, fear, blood, and shit that sounds pleasant or resident evil rotting corpse smell. Even if it's not an obvious bad idea video game what happens when you get smell cartridges running low, bad programming or a faulty smell thingy what awful smells will it produce then.
A friend of mine was on the "highway of Death" in Gulf I. He said the worst part was the stench of burnt decaying bodies. Or the smell of you team members after being in a scenario of two weeks game time without TP or showers. Or the smell of NPCs who lose a morale roll and pee and crap their pants.
It may make war less glamorous for all the arm chair warriors out there and make peace more attractive.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Unlike stuff we see and hear, you can't describe what we smell on a single dimension, and that's why we literally have hundreds or perhaps thousands of different olfactory receptors, while we have only three major types of light receptors on our retinas - and, correspondingly, three different color signals in most color display adapters.
While this machine promises 20 basic scents, I suspect, even if they were delivered well and integrated into a game seamlessly, you'd grow bored of them quickly.
I could see some limited uses - warning a player of a nearby danger, for example, which would work well with the limitations of olfaction - unless sounds or sights, our olfactory system adapts rather quickly to smells. A brief exposure to a certain aroma might be effective at the right point in the right game, but for such little reward this seems like a rather awkward solution. That said, aromas can be quite evocative, activating our limbic system in unique ways that could provide for an in-depth experience far richer that we've seen before - for example, the smell of incense in an abbey, for me, might be the difference between "yet another generic abbey" and "this feels real to me."
I like to shoot, but too much, especially automatic, and the propellant gasses make me want to barf. It's hard to breathe in a cloud of that stuff.
Plus I've been in a war, saw the dead and burned bodies, and smelled them. It is not pleasant. And in that war game don't forget to add the smell of diesel and body odor from your comrades. Hey, let's add the smell of the burning shit cans under the outhouses if you want to get really realistic.
I'll keep my FPS scent-free, thank you.
The iSmell or iSmell Personal Scent Synthesizer was a computer peripheral device developed by DigiScents in 2001. The prototype connected to a personal computer via USB or serial port and was designed to emit a smell when a user visited a web site or opened an email. The device contained a cartridge with 128 "primary odors," which could be mixed to replicate natural and man-made odors. DigiScents had indexed thousands of common odors, which could be coded, digitized, and embedded into web pages or email.[1]
In 2006, the iSmell was named one of the "25 Worst Tech Products of All Time" by PC World Magazine, which commented that "[f]ew products literally stink, but this one did--or at least it would have, had it progressed beyond the prototype stage.[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ismell
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Given that the Porn market is generally the driving force behind the adoption of any new computer technology, I shudder to imagine just what the first applications for this will be... I assume they already have the "sushi" smell developed...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
A real stinker.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."