Many refuse to admit it, but we’ve all shed at least one tear at the end of a particularly emotional film. Who has ever cried because of a video game? This is another frontier that could fall this year, since we have finally found a way to add a new emotional dimension to digital environments, thanks to… smell.
You had to have flair, but a company has just developed the equivalent for the 21ste century of Odorama, an odoriferous technique that certainly has hints of the last century. In front of the screen, at the right time, you had to scratch the right box to produce an odor associated with a specific film scene.
We quickly understand at first sight why this olfactory immersion has only passed.
It smells good
What the folks at OVR Technology hope to release before the end of the current year is a lot more polished. It is a collar at the end of which an odor generator has been installed, which functions more or less like an inkjet printer. Where the printer combines yellow and blue to draw a green line on paper, OVR’s gadget combines any of its eight primary essences to generate particular scents.
These essences are inspired by the perfume industry. OVR calls them human, fresh, earthy, green, lemony, floral, gourmand and woody.
The device pairs with a mobile app via Bluetooth. The application allows you to dose each of these essences to produce the scent of your choice. This “recipe” can then be shared with other users of the application, or in the form of an “olfactory track” that is added to a video, like adding a musical score.
What we seem to hope from OVR’s side is that people will massively adopt its technology and that they will start creating “multi-sensory experiences”, in short, videos with image, sound and aromas, and that they will publish their creations as we already do on social networks.
A TikTok in Odorama, ultimately. Videos to be played in bursts or in a loop, to live or relive generous experiences in colors and smells, but also… in emotions.
“Smell is the only one of our senses that plugs directly into the area of our brain associated with emotions,” says OVR Technology CEO Aaron Wisniewski. “We spend billions of dollars on perfumes, fragrances and deodorants every year. Smells make us happier, more energetic, more seductive…Smell is everywhere in our lives…and now they can enter our digital lives as well. »
Pip and tears
Make cry. This is one of the most difficult challenges in digital technology. It has long been presented as the ultimate frontier both in video games in particular and in immersive environments in general. Part of the solution may lie in odors.
The big boss of OVR says it himself: the sense of smell is the sense closest to our emotions. He’s not wrong. Scents sniffed at random are sometimes enough to bring out memories that we thought were buried forever.
One can imagine that it would be enough to reproduce the right smell to produce the desired emotion, but it is not so simple. OVR works in particular with the American Air Force to decode, through smell, the functioning of the brains of veterans who have developed depressive or suicidal tendencies.
The key is perhaps more in the association of smells with images made by other users, rather than prefabricated in the factory. “There will be trial and error. Scent artists will initially be like musicians experimenting with their instruments,” predicts Aaron Wisniewski. “But eventually, we will be able to create olfactory experience playlists in the same way that we create music playlists on Spotify. »
On that day, we will know a little more about the relationship between smells and the emotions of the public. But we already know a ray of it: there are olfactory marketing agencies that will offer the right fragrance to make a place more welcoming. In Las Vegas, where OVR presented its technology for the first time, each casino and each hotel developed its own fragrance.
The smell of a cinema, a gymnasium, a church, all of this can be easily reproduced and then inserted into a video game or into an immersive video or presented in a virtual reality environment.
This is also the ultimate goal of OVR: to create the missing sensory link to make the metaverse truly realistic. We already have the image and the sound, in the headphones. There are tank tops, gloves, pants, and other accessories that mimic physical contact. The sense of smell would certainly add a new facet to the experience.
It remains to be seen whether VR enthusiasts, mostly gamers, will be willing to put on a scent necklace under their helmet, in exchange for the promise of experiencing new emotions.
The people who meet them in real life while they wear all this paraphernalia will also have a special emotional experience. Because here is an outfit that is likely to make them cry… with laughter.
This text was funded with support from the Transat International Journalism Fund.The duty.